Category Archives: Ayn Rand

Elizabeth Sandifer is the author of Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt-Right. She has taken a deep dive into the thoughts and writings of the so-called neoreactionary movement, or the new right, a tendency highlighted in a recent Vanity Fair article by James Pogue, who reported from the National Conservative Conference. Pogue argues that there is a new tendency in right-wing thought that is influencing some prominent Republican candidates for office, including J.D. Vance of Ohio and Blake Masters of Arizona, both of whom have close ties to Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, and also to a rather mysterious and lesser-known public intellectual by the name of Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Is this a fringe intellectual tendency that can be ignored, or a budding movement? Sandifer spoke with editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson on the Current Affairs podcast to sort things out. This interview has been edited and condensed for grammar and clarity.

Elizabeth Sandifer, I need you to help us understand this neoreactionary tendency. Can you discuss what it is?

Neoreaction is one attempt of modern far right philosophywe can just go ahead and call it fascismto create an intellectual basis. It was formulated by Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, or formerly wrote.

The artist formerly known as Moldbug?

These days he uses his real name Curtis Yarvin, but I still think of him as Moldbug because thats what he was going by when I wrote about him. Yarvin has been quite influential on a number of key people. He has a demonstrably huge influence on Peter Thiel. We know hes got influence on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as that Vanity Fair articlee makes clear. We have very strong evidence that hes had influence on Steve Bannon. Hes just a guy a lot of these people look to as kind of an intellectual light. Hes been on the Tucker Carlson show, which did a fair bit to mainstream him. So a lot of people look up to him as something of an intellectual light, which is interesting if you actually read any of his work, because, well I call him outright stupid in my book, and Im gonna largely stand by that.

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing philosophy thats really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a complimentand I very much mean as an insulthes kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is hes just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousnessall these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug daysand hes not really backed down off of it in any substantive wayis that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvins philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I dont want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of Californiathat is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

The philosophy here is explicitly monarchist, right? He openly believes that one person should have almost absolute power.

The person should be accountable to a board of directors, perhaps. But no more than that, and the board of directors should just be able to fire him and replace him with a new absolute monarchy if they feel the need. Hes very clear on that. Again, back in his more satirical Moldbug days, he actually advocated for Stuart restoration in the UK, the rolling back of the Glorious Revolution, and undoing William of Oranges takeover and the reign of William and Mary to put it back in the hands of the Stuart kings. He thought that the Whiggish democratic turn was a fundamental mistake of history that should be undone. Again, this is him in his older satirical mode.

Was he being satirical when he endorsed or appeared to endorse human slavery?

This is the problem with his semi-satirical, clickbait-y mode of writing. He doesnt seem to make a huge distinction between employees and slaves in his philosophical system. He certainly seems to believe that outright indentured servitude and ownership is an acceptable arrangement. And he sure did overtly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to make good slaves. These are all things he definitely, literally says. Was he perhaps being satirical? I guess my response to that is: do you really care if hes being satirical when he says Black people are genetically predisposed to making good slaves? Personally, I dont.

I am torn as to how valuable it is to go into the philosophy because, as you say, it is, in many ways, extremely stupid. I was reading it. This guy has a Substack and it is, to me, unreadable.

He is frighteningly verbose. Ive heard people say hes a good writer. I dont see it at all.

Oh, my God. Ive never read anything worse.

Right. As someone who has written a number of books and at least has a modest amount of popular acclaim, inasmuch as I am an expert on prose writing, his prose is absolutely unreadable. Its shit. Im allowed to swear here, right?

Yes.

Its complete festering dogshit. Its horrible. It is verbose. It makes a painful lack of effort to get to the point on the occasion when it actually makes a point. His argumentation aspires to shoddiness, because that would at least imply that theres a degree of construction there. Its absolutely awful. I take it apart in some meticulous detail in Neoreaction a Basilisk because in that book, I thought it was important to pay it as much intellectual respect as I could before I took it out back and shot it. But it was not hard to argue against and to find the flaws. Youre really playing on easy mode there.

Your book does a public service. People dont have to comb through thousands of pages to try to understand the things youve read. Youve laid it out.

Ill make this fully explicit. I cannot encourage you enough not to bother reading this. You have something better to do with your lifeclipping your toenails, perhaps. Staring at a wall. Many small crimes that only do a little bit of harm. Avoid reading him. Literally almost anything you can think of to do right now is a better idea than reading Curtis Yarvin.

I felt a certain kinship with you. One of the things I do for Current Affairs is read right-wing books and review them.

Some of us, because of what can only be described as poor life choices, find ourselves in careers where it is necessary to read these things and describe them for other people in hopefully more entertaining and efficient ways. And, you know, as a fellow member of this profession, you have my sympathy. But for listeners who are not writers and do not imminently intend to publish a book and get paid for it, do not read this unless someone is paying you good money.

It was kind of shocking to me when I started a dive into the collected works of Moldbug. It doesnt really make many attempts to be convincing in a very logical way. I mean, lets say you were to try to persuade me that its a good idea to have a dictator, which is what he believes. He believes that we should have a dictator. He believes in a hierarchy. He believes in abolishing democracy and elections and the participation of the governed in governance. If you were to try to convince me of those incredibly radical propositions that instinctively horrify me, you would have a pretty high burden. And he doesnt even really seem to make much of an attempt to show why this wouldnt be horrifying and dystopian.

It reads hellishly dystopian. You could write a really good cyberpunk dystopia off of the ideas espoused by Curtis Yarvin. I may or may not be working on that. Theres a passage in his Mencius Moldbug days when he very ardently and passionately describes basically the entire Whiggish movementa lot of old British radical groups like the Levellers and more broadly the entire kind of romantic, rebellious artistic tradition of British literature, people like William Blakeas a bunch of freaks who he despises and thinks the world is worse off for existing. I am someone who is very passionate about William Blake in particular. A lot of these people that he dismisses as evil freaks, I look to as outright role models.

I have a very, very strong and basic disagreement with Yarvin/Moldbug Im going to be doing this [with his name] the whole podcast. I apologize.

If he attached the name Moldbug to himself once, he has to live with that for life. Im not going to participate in this project to mainstream him by calling him Curtis Yarvin.

I have some very basic strong philosophical differences with him on very fundamental aesthetic, almost primal levels. I look at his work and am viscerally repulsed. I read his ideal society and see what sounds to me like a description of Hell.

Whats interesting about reading far right philosophy is that theyre very open about their attempt to make a world that would not be worth living in. I have read Mein Kampf, and everything Hitler lays out is a program for killing everyone I love and everything that I love.

I suppose in defense of their logical consistency and intellectual honesty, I wouldnt want to be alive in their world, but they dont want me to be alive in their world, either.

Its true. Theyre pretty clear about it. The word fascism is tossed about a lot. But I think one of the things that is valuable about the works of Yarvin is that hes very open about it. He really does say: We need a dictatorship, and it needs to be pretty absolute. And I hate all of the freaks. And I believe in a world of order, and Im not going to try to justify why that order is good. But I think that I, and people like me, should be at the top of the social hierarchy, and everyone else should be brutally oppressed.

Hes not a venture capitalist billionaire or anything. But I think he really thinks people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk should be running the world. There is something of a cult around these people, and Yarvin believes in it wholeheartedly. Yarvin absolutely believes that people who are good at making money are probably good at everything else.

So the way that weve talked about it so far makes it seem like it could appeal to almost nobody who wasnt extremely rich themselves. Musk obviously has his cult. But theres something that you discuss in the book that seems to be part of the source of the appeal of these ideas. Anti-semitism is often called the socialism of fools, right? Because it uses some of the opposition to capitalists and bankers, but it misplaces the villain. Yarvins diagnosis of societythe things that he points out, that hes trying to rectify, he actually matches about 30 percent of things that I hear Noam Chomsky say about the dysfunctions of liberalism. That gives a certain truth to some of what he says in terms of his diagnosis, even though his prescription is fascism.

My dear friend, Jack Graham, who co-wrote one of the chapters of Neoreaction a Basilisk with me, gave me a phrase that I happily stole within the book, where he says that Yarvin is a failed Marxist in the same way that Jupiter is a failed star. Yarvin starts down this analysis, and if you follow it reasonably rigorously, you get to a fairly accurate and useful diagnosis of everything that is wrong with the world. And then somewhere on the way, before he gets to any of those actual good points, he makes just an apocalyptic wrong turn, and concludes that Steve Jobs should become king of California.

So perhaps you could describe the starting point of his analysis of what is wrong with society.

His starting point is the extremely self-evident assertion that there is an overall consensus. He reinvents the Overton window from scratch. He reinvents the idea that there is a dictated set of opinions which are acceptable and possible to discuss and to take seriously. There is this political center around which nothing can orbit too far away from without freezing to death. Its fundamentally dictated by a number of elite and powerful institutions. So the New York Times does a whole lot to dictate what the political center is. There are many other examples. The ones that Yarvin is most obsessed with are basically the media, academia, and the civil service end of government. He views those as the big three institutions that are imposing a kind of absolute consensus that he says is drifting in an ever leftward liberal direction. He points to the progress of civil rights, takes Martin Luther King, Jr.s observation about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice over the long run and renders it a horror story, actually referring to this centrist consensus as Cthulhu and saying that Cthulhu always swims left.

The sensible thing to do is probably to look at the role of money in this.

Yes. I was going to point out that theres a notable absence from that list, which is big business.

Nowhere on Yarvins list of things that are controlling the world and setting up a political center is finance. Whereas, in reality, finance turns out to do an awful lot, as evidenced by the fact that, for instance, if you happen to be one of the richest people in the world, you can meet your girlfriend on a web site, have a bit of a falling out with her, get made fun of, and decide youre going to suddenly now own one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Thats a thing that can happen if you are a billionaire. It is not a thing that can happen to most people. And so suddenly, Twitterone of these huge social media sites, something that is quite central to media discourseis getting taken over by someone who is spouting a lot of far-right ideas, who initially made his money working with Peter Thiel, who is the person whose is bankrolling Curtis Yarvins bullshit, who is very clearly influenced by this orbit. I know that the Wall Street Journal reported that Thiel was advising Musk on his Twitter takeover. And suddenly they own this massive media platform, and the only reason thats happening is money. There is no academic, no civil service, no mainstream media component to why Twitter is about to take a right-wing plunge. It is entirely because money has a shitload of power. To give a very, very basic analysis that probably, you know, is downright obvious to a number of your listeners, but its something that never occurs to Yarvin.

Moldbug talks about a small class of elites controlling the discourse, and he talks about, as you say, the boundaries of acceptable opinionand when he says that, hes almost 100 percent overlapping with Chomsky. But as you point out, theres this absence of Marx in his work, where Moldbug doesnt seem to have read or understood the left analysis of these things.

In his last big essay under the Moldbug pen name, he creates this acronym/mantra, America is a communist country, and claims that it is true in all sorts of different ways that you can interpret it. And one thing that literally never comes up anywhere in that essay is whether America is actually run on communist principles similar to those explained by Karl Marx. That literally never occurs to Moldbugin the course of literally thousands of words about how America is supposedly a communist countrywhich is something of an intellectual oversight, I think. I feel like there is a failure of due diligence that went on in this essay.

We have dwelled on the work of a somewhat obscure and stupid person whos a bad writer. But when I read that Vanity Fair article, I got chills. J.D. Vance is explicitly saying that Yarvin has a bunch of great ideas. J.D. Vance could be in the Senate.

Look at the U.S. Senate. You dont necessarily see that a U.S. senator is a lot better than a billionaire as evidence of intelligence.

Its true.

There are, in fact, a lot of stupid people in the United States Senate. And Im willing to say that as a bipartisan critique.

But there are not necessarily that many people who explicitly espouse a desire for a dictatorship. And there are some quotes from J.D. Vance in that article, where the writer says Vance sounds like hes talking about a coup. Vance says that the next president should fire everyone in the government, replace them with ideologues, and ignore the courts if they try to stop him.

Right. The flip side of that is we shouldnt delude ourselves about the fact that there are multiple fascistsin the U.S. government right nowwho want to overthrow the U.S. government. Vance is coming in. Look at Joshua Hawley out of Missouri. Hes just as fucking bad. Hes espousing the same level of fascist takeover shit. And those are the more intellectual ones. Go into the House and suddenly you get Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene and that clan of nut jobs. (I do mean clan.) There are people who are in the U.S. Congress who are fully endorsing these fascist monarchic ideas. The Vance idea is interesting to me because the specific fascist ideas hes espousing are ones I wrote a book on six years ago. But at the end of the day, we shouldnt treat Vance as an outlier at this point. The really scary thing is, hes not.

Yes. Even if there arent that many who are tied to this weird specific neoreaction thing, this neoreactionary ideology is kind of, as you say, a more explicit and upfront statement of the basic right-wing worldview, which is in favor of really strict social hierarchies enforced by violence and keeping down anyone who would dare to challenge those hierarchies.

Along with strong populist and, inevitably, in practice, white dude dictators who run this jackboot and pony show.

We should talk about a couple of the other figures in your book besides Yarvin. But the book is called Neoreaction a Basilisk. Explain what the Basilisk in the title is.

Oh, God. Okay. So, Curtis Yarvin came to present prominencegot his initial readership before he spun off to his own blogon a website called Overcoming Bias, a website loosely organized around a community that called themselves the rationalists. The main figure in that is a guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who would describe himself as an AI researcher. Its important to note that he has literally no computer science qualifications; cannotto the best of my knowledgecode; has never built an AI; and does not actually understand anything about how AI works on a technical level. But he is an AI researcher, which really means he writes science fiction. He writes science fiction novels that he passes off as philosophy and scholarship. He is horribly obsessed with the idea that someday an artificial intelligence is going to wake up, achieve sentience, take over the world, and destroy humanity because it sees no point in humanity. He writes great science fiction phrases. Hes got a phrase: The AI does not love you. The AI does not hate you. But you are made out of atoms which the AI can use for something else. Thats charming and chilling, and throw that into a science fiction horror book about an evil AI and youre going to get a Hugo nomination for that stuff. As an analysis of computer science and the state of play of current technology, it has nothing to do with anything that is actually happening in AI research, nanotechnology, or anything else. Its purely science fiction. But its pretty good science fiction.

And so a lot of tech bro people are really, really into him because he makes them feel good. He says that theyre all super logical, rational people, and they can learn to make no mistakes if they just use his one weird trick for thinking rationally. Hes just had a lot of influence despite being frankly a kind of weirdo cult leader.

But the Basilisk. What you actually asked about. The Basilisk comes from an incident that arose in Yudkowskys community where this guy named Roko, who went on to be a fascist, came up with a thought experiment imagining a futuristic, godlike AI. As I said, theyre terrified of an evil AI. They also want to create a god AI that will reincarnate them on a hard drive so they can live forever. And so this guy Roko imagined the god AI and said: Wait a minute, what if when the god AI exists, he looks back at everyone who failed to help bring him about and declares theyre evil, and should be reincarnated on a computer and tortured for all eternity? He made this argument that was entirely consistent with the many weird cult-like premises of Yudkowsky and his rationalists and created this idea of this godlike AI that would torture them all if they didnt give all their money to AI research to try to bring him aboutwhich, if you look at it from a perspective of not being a weirdo AI cult member, is basically just reinventing Pascals Wager.

Pascals wager being that it pays to believe in God because if you dont, God will punish youif he exists.

Yes, good explanation. And so all of these AI cultists, broadly speaking, absolutely lost their shit. They had an epic meltdown-panic attack. Yudkowsky was, at one point, screaming in all caps about how the worst thing you can possibly do is talk about the evil godlike AI in the future that does this, because talking about it brings it into existence. Everyone is having a complete emotional meltdown over having accidentally invented Pascals Wager. And the whole incident eventually becomes a bit of popular lore that people who are the right kind of nerd know about. Jokes about Rokos Basilisk, which is what this whole affair became known as, were actually what got Elon Musk and Grimes together. They both made the same pun about Rokos Basilisk independently and found each other through it.

Wow. I never knew that.

My friend, David Gerard, who was the initial reader and editor of Neoreaction a Basilisk, was the one who preserved all the transcripts of the meltdown and put them on RationalWiki. Thats why anyone knows about this. So he is ultimately single-handedly responsible for Elon Musk taking over Twitter just by popularizing Rokos Basilisk. Its horrible. He feels terrible about it.

I fear that some of our listeners, hearing your explanation, may have thought to themselves at some point during

What the fuck is going on here?

I dont understand this. Its bizarre.

I should have prefaced this with: What I am about to say is going to sound completely insane, and thats because it is.

Im glad you explained it because I think that its important to understand that even if you dont grasp this whole thing about a godlike artificial intelligence in the future and whatever

And you should feel better about yourself if you dont. If it did make any sense, you should really be worried.

First, the people who believe in this very bizarre thing consider themselves to be extremely logicalmore logical than anyone else, right?

Yes. Functionally, they believe themselves to be, if not infallible on an individual level, at least infallible on a collective level.

Secondly, this rationalist community that youre talking about that drifts into extremely bizarre and sometimes fascist beliefs is quite influential in Silicon Valley.

Hugely so. If you talk not just to management, but even many of the frontline software engineer/coder nerds, they all know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is. This is absolutely a household name within the specific bubble and enclave of Silicon Valley tech.

And theres an entire intellectual ecosystem here. Youve written about the Slate Star Codex blog.

Ah, yes, Mr. Siskind.

Hes this rationalist whos very opposed to social justice politics and is, perhaps, a little too open-minded about Charles Murray and

Hes a gateway to outright fascist ideas. He has openly said that he is a race eugenicist who believes that IQ is heritable. He definitely believes this to be true. He has said as much. He plays a little coy in public, but in his personal beliefs, he is a racist authoritarian. I absolutely believe this.

And he is extremely popular among some people. He has a big following among a lot of these Silicon Valley types.

Absolutely. His blog was widely considered essential reading among the Silicon Valley types. And then you go to the subreddit for his blog, and people are literally posting the 14 words, which are a huge white nationalist slogan and just not even a dog whistle, just a whistle.

One of the reasons I wanted to speak to you is that it does seem as if the things that youve been writing about for years were curiosities when you started writing about them, or had a cult following. It seems to be inching closer and closer to the mainstream, both through J.D. Vance and through Elon Musk. Musk talks about the AI thats going to destroy us all, and Im sure is inspired by a lot of these people.

The important takeaway here is that all of the people Ive been describing are very, very stupid. Their ideas make no sense if you look at them under any scrutiny whatsoever. And they are actively taking over the world right now. And they are going to kill millions of people. Its funny on the one hand, but on the other hand, they are actively taking over the world, and they are literally going to kill people like me. I want to be deadly serious here. These people are very, very evil, and they are actively gaining power.

I think thats incredibly important. Its so easyespecially if you look at the writings of Moldbugto just look at it and go, this is a bunch of garbage. Who could be persuaded by this?

And the answer is: literally the top adviser [Steve Bannon] of our last president. That is who can be persuaded.

To hear the story of this weird Basilisk and that all these people think the Basilisk from the future is coming and then to realize that these are people who are in positions of quite high status and who have the dangerous fallacious belief that they are as close to perfectly logical as one can be.

I dont want to suggest that Elon Musk literally believes in Rokos Basilisk, but the new owner of one of the largest social media sites in the world definitely takes Rokos Basilisk a lot more seriously than it deserves to be taken. And that should definitely raise some red flags, especially when you get into the fact that he made his money with Peter Thiel and Thiel bankrolled Yarvin and bankrolled Yudkowsky. Theres a network of people here who are increasingly powerful, and they are very, very scary.

We talked about the dictatorial tendencies, but we havent discussed the extent to which a lot of this is founded on anti-wokeness and the hatred of Black Lives Matter and other movements for liberation.

When you describe this stuff, it doesnt sound very appealing. And so, to most of the people upon whose electoral support this movement relies, these arent the bits they describe. What they describe is: Black people are all getting free crack pipes from Obama. What they describe is, trans people are grooming your kids and are going to take them away from you. What they describe is the entire pro-life argument: pro life, anti-abortion, anti-choice, what is about to win in the U.S. Supreme Court and outlaw abortion for more than half of the country. These are the arguments they use to win electoral power. But behind the scenes, when you trace the intellectual roots of the arguments of the people who are in practice running a site like Breitbart, these are the things you find.

Yarvin openly talked about how political alliances with white nationalist are sometimes odious because theyre stupid, nasty people but probably useful for achieving the political goals he wants. Most of them are racist, transphobic, misogynistic assholes themselves. I dont want to suggest that these aspects of their arguments are purely ironic affectation. Fundamentally, if you give even the remotest shit about Black people, you dont ally with white nationalists. The very fact that you ally with white nationalists speaks volumes about your racism. The active spear tip of this movement is anti-wokeism and fears about cancel culture and critical race theory and all that.

When you look at what actually happensyou look at the way in which the education system is of paramount importance in Yarvins conspiracy theory, there is a direct line from that to using groomer panic and critical race theory to stage a fascist takeover of the entire Florida educational system, which just happened. It just happened. Floridas education system has literally banned most of the stuff that Curtis Yarvin thinks is secretly running the world. So these ideas are having a huge impact. There were many, many steps between Curtis Yarvin and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But those steps existed and can be linearly traced.

I watched the full Yarvin interview with Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson was totally fascinated.

Of course he was.

Carlson presented Yarvin as this fascinating intellectual who is silenced by the mainstream but who has really, really valuable and interesting ideas. The whole hour they spent was Yarvin expounding this theory that there is this kind of conspiracy of elites that he calls the cathedral that consists of Harvard and the New York Times and the government and all that. And he was explaining to Tucker how people who put Black Lives Matter signs in their yard, that the sign really says, I love power and conformity.

He talked about the red pill. He said, youre going to take the red pill, youre gonna see things for how they really are. And Tucker Carlson has his mind blown by Curtis. But, importantly, all of it is about the big woke conspiracy that rules the country. None of it is about the solution being fascism, even though thats what Yarvin believes.

Right. You dont say the fascism on primetime on Fox News. You say that at your little conservative conference where youve got the true believers. There is very much the propaganda front. And if you look at the overt political goals of these peoplewhich is absolutely monarchic, or, at least oligarchic dictatorship of the very, very richyou can absolutely see why Fox News is making the political moves in this.

I want to just read a little passage from the end of your book that made me laugh. You write: To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos, stupid. Donald Trump, Vox Day, stupid, stupid, stupid. MAGA and The Daily Stormer are stupid. Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

I stand by every word of that.

I like it when people on the left are aggressive in confronting this stuff. Your writing is a manifesto for intelligence and thinking about things carefully. The alternative to this horrible apocalyptic stupidity is something that we have to offer. And your writing is very beautiful, and its fun. You not only dissect in this book some of these horrific stupidities, but you do so with a kind of wit and beautiful prose that makes me want to be on your side rather than with these stupid neoeactionaries.

You talk about my being aggressive. I want to point out that I was sitting on a laptop in a comfortable roomsmoking what, I will not saywhile I wrote most of that book. I was in a very safe place. There are activists who are on the frontlines who are having these people screaming in their faces. There are activists who will go to jail and will get themselves killed in the long run continuing to stand up to these people, to do whatever it takes to make sure that these people do not take power and do not kill the people that they want to kill. And those are the people who were being aggressive. Those are the people who deserve praise. If my book has value it is that it will make people realize how bad the situation is, look up those activists, and get in that protest line and get their faces screamed at, too. Fundamentally, thats what bravery and confrontation looks like, not writing a book about it.

Originally posted here:

The Strange and Terrifying Ideas of Neoreactionaries Current Affairs - Current Affairs

Who gets to decide what everything means?

Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. So it's only natural that when people analyze his work, they dig deep. Scorsese is known for injecting spirituality, violence, and moralism into every frame. When The Irishman came out, I watched every video essay on the subject. I rememberThomas Flighttalking about how the opening scene of the movie was a self-homage back to Goodfellas, how Scorsese was talking about whether or not his own work would hold up as he aged, as we watched his movie about a gangster aging. I thought that was such a poignant take. One rife with interesting beats.

Until Scorsese got on camera and debunked it himself.

To his credit, Thomas Flight made another video talking about the objectivism and relativism of moviemaking and direction. It really intrigued me, and also I think it's a good debate for our website.

Check out this video fromThomas Flight, and let's talk after.

I am one of those movie watchers who likes to assign meaning to everything. Meaning makes films fulfilling to me. It broadens how we see things and also adds a mythos to directors and writers who are trying to imbue a sort of depth and wonder into their projects.

I also love a good debate on what movies mean. But the real debate actually seems to be... who gets to decide what movies actually mean?

Is it the audience, watching and debating? Or is it the director, pontificating in interviews and videos, telling us what they wanted us to take away?

Does the director's intent matter? Or do only we matter?

It's complicated. And it takes us to two big words in the discussion: objectivism and relativism.

Objectivism isthe film theory that the main objective of the human experience is to define things via personal experience. It came from thephilosophy of author Ayn Rand. In our situation, it means that the meaning of a film comes from the personal experience of the director. They dictate what the movie is about, and we do not matter.

Let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Relativism isthe belief that there's no absolute truth, only the truths that an individual believes. If you believe in relativism within film theory, you think different people can have different views on what things mean within cinema. Sure, the director can say one thing, but the audience can read it in an entirely different way.

Obviously, both these words mean a lot (pun intended) when it comes to this argument. Like it or not, when you argue a movie, you're taking a stance on what you believe.

If I had to choose, I think I come down on the side of relativism. The reason is that I think we see a lot of art get perverted or misinterpreted or repurposed for the people's senses, and not necessarily the director's. Think about Fight Club, which was about toxic masculinity, only to get adopted by toxic male viewers.

On the funnier side, I have always loved the filmic reading of A Star is Born having to do with 9-11.

Sometimes viewers actively choose to ignore a director's intent and adopt their own readings in order to fully enjoy a work, like in horror where misogyny and racism can be rampantor in cases of queerbaiting when directors insist characters aren't LGBTQ, despite whatever subtext performers and storytellers choose to bring to a film (see The Batman).

Still, I deeply respect every director who comes out and explains their metaphor and deep dives. And I tend to take them at their word and try to read the film the way it was intended.

Maybe there is a balance here. You can disagree with the intent. And for directors, maybe they didn't get the story perfectly enough or clearly enough to achieve their goals. Then a middle can be found between the people and the creators.

There's a lot to debate here, and it's such a wonderful topic to pick apart. So where do you land in the argument? Let me know in the comments!

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Martin Scorsese, Objectivism, Relativism, and How We Read Cinema - No Film School

Ayn Rand and the pandemic

Like many young people, I was a fan of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. I even attend several Objectivist conferences in college. Though I ended any formal association with her movement decades ago, and Ive come to disagree with her about many things, I still consider her influence a net positive on my thinking.

First and foremost, I credit her with introducing me to the ideal of independent, critical thinking. Rand posits that there is an objective reality we can learn about through science and reason. She was a staunch atheist who rejected all forms of mysticism and groupthink. As she put it,

A is A. Facts are facts, independent of any consciousness. No amount of passionate wishing, desperate longing or hopeful pleading can alter the facts. Nor will ignoring or evading the facts erase them: the facts remain, immutable.

I agree, and this ethos clearly influenced my previous defense of skepticism. Things arent true just because we want them to be true, and Ive written previously about the dangers of hopium and confirmation bias. Most of our pandemic woes are due to deniers who refuse to accept that A is A about an unthinking virus. The dangerous belief that its harms can wished away has been a core theme of my writing here.

Rand also believed that people have the absolute right to protection from physical aggression from any source. She vigorously defended abortion as a moral right and believed that people could do whatever they wanted with their bodies as long as their actions dont directly impact anyone else. As the saying goes, your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.

To this end, she had some interesting thoughts about vaccines and contagious diseases. Theres no question she would favor allowing private entities to establish whatever rules they wanted regarding vaccines. Indeed a recent Objectivist conference wisely required either proof of vaccination or a negative test prior to attendance. However, Rand was against the government forcibly vaccinating people, at least for a vaccine that perfectly prevented the disease. In this hypothetical scenario, no ones choice would impact anyone else. She said,

Now, requiring inoculation against disease: should this be a job for the government? Most definitely not and there is a very simple answer for it. If it is medically proved that a certain inoculation is in fact practical and desirable, those who want it will take that inoculation. Now if some people do not see it that waydo not agree or dont want to take it, only they will be in danger since all the other people will be inoculated. Those who do not go along, if they are wrong in this case, will merely catch the disease. They will not be a danger to anyone else and nobody has the right to force them to do anything for their own good against their own judgement. They will merely be ill then, but they could not infect others.

Of course, no vaccine is perfect, and the idea that the unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated is one of the oldest anti-vaccine tropes out there. In the real world, this issue is more complicated.

However, in another sense, this issue is actually quite simple. No one was required to get a vaccine this pandemic. Some people had to make some tough choices, but no one was strapped down and vaccinated by government goons. This only happens in the fevered imaginations of delusional anti-vaxxers, desperate to portray themselves as oppressed victims.

As far as I know, the government used force to vaccinate people only once in my lifetime, when several children were vaccinated against measles over 30 years ago. Im confident Rand would have supported this action, as nine unvaccinated children had already died. She would have recognized that children arent property, and the government can intervene when their caretakers seriously jeopardize their health. As she put it, a child is an individual, and has the rights inherent in the nature of a human individual. Amen.

Rand also had interesting thoughts on non-pharmaceutical interventions. She said,

The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? Its to protect those people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others. Here you are dealing with a demonstrable physical damage.

Remember that in all issues of protecting someone from physical damage, before a government can properly act, there has to be a scientific, objective demonstration of an actual physical danger. If it is demonstrated, then the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease, in other words to quarantine the people who are ill is not an interference with their rights, it is merely preventing them from doing physical damage to others.

Again, this seems eminently reasonable. The locked TB ward outside my office never bothered me, and Ive never heard any Objectivist complain about it either, though of course this drastic measure would be unenforceable for a disease like COVID.

Beyond this, her novels championed creators who were often loathed not because they were incompetent or dishonest, but because they were brilliant, dedicated, and independent. Rands heros were people of action who created and discovered things that improved all of our lives. The Wikipedia entry on The Fountainhead describes its protagonist as an intransigent young architect, who battles against conventional standards and refuses to compromise with an architectural establishment unwilling to accept innovation. I think my distaste for doctors who spread dangerous medical myths and refuse to correct basic errors in their writing can be traced back to this intransigent young architect.

Its hard to think of a better Randian hero this pandemic than Dr. Katalin Karik, a scientist who toiled anonymously for years because she loved her job. You are not going to work you are going to have fun, her husband would say to her. Though her work was ignored for years, she knew its value, and now the entire world knows as well. Her research led to the mRNA vaccines, and she has saved countless lives. One news report described her thusly.

By all accounts intense and single-minded, Dr. Karik lives for the bench the spot in the lab where she works. She cares little for fame. The bench is there, the science is good, she shrugged in a recent interview. Who cares?

This is exactly what a Randian hero would say and do, and heroic women were central to Rands novels.

In contrast, Rands villains created nothing and sought to destroy those with a spark of independence and greatness. One such villain stated his mission was to

Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men cant be ruled. We dont want any great men. Dont deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.

Its harder to think of a better Randian villain this pandemic than someone who spreads disinformation about vaccines, knowing they will never have to deal with the consequences. These people cant create or do anything themselves. Instead, they seek to undermine the work of scientists like Dr. Karik in order to promote their own political and social agenda.

A Rand villain, jealous that his perceived genius is unappreciated by the masses, would seek to take down a widely-admired scientist by calling him the number one anti-vaxxer, for example. He would promote himself relentlessly in the media and have a preternatural sense of victimhood. He would be mocked for claiming he carried papers giving him permission to go to work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The removal of a YouTube video would enrage a Randian villain, and being called fringe would send him running to a TV camera to bemoan his sad fate.

In contrast, these insults would be a speck of dust to Dr. Karik. Who cares? shed say. Shed never consider herself a victim in a pandemic where one million Americans died. People like are her are too busy trying to stop the virus and save lives.

Given Rands devotion to rationality, her belief the government can take steps to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others, and her admiration for scientists, one might expect Objectivitists to express reasonable positions on the pandemic. I never expected them to be cheerleaders for lockdowns, though of course the lockdowns had no cheerleaders. However, I expected them to have a nuanced view of the subject during a time when nearly 1,000 New Yorkers were dying every day. At a bare minimum, I expected them to strongly encourage vaccination, including for children. After all, over 1,500 children have died of COVID, and the vaccine has proven to be very effective in preventing these dire outcomes. Vaccinating children is the rational thing to do. Its not even a close call.

A is A, right?

Indeed some Objectivists have written very reasonable essays this pandemic, with one writer noting that no one has the right to infect other people with a dangerous disease and warning against fake news, conspiracy theories, and the like. He asked to give gratitude,

First and foremost, the doctors, nurses, and others in health care who are working overtime and at risk to deal with the rise in Covid-19 patients.

I knew the author of that essay and I admired him a lot. This wise and compassionate essay aged incredibly well I think, which is very rare for early pandemic thoughts.

This aside, it sadly seems whenever a Rand acolyte discusses COVID, its mostly fake news, conspiracy theories, and the like. For example, consider the relationship between Objectivists and the Brownstone Institute, the successor to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). There is a strong alliance between Objectivists and those sheltered doctors who fetishize natural immunity, encourage unvaccinated young people to catch the virus, and both spread and legitimize rank anti-vaccine disinformation. These are the people who surveyed scenes of forklifts dumping dead bodies into refrigerated trucks in NYC and concluded that too many people were trying to avoid the virus.

Really.

Even as the virus shutters schools (including private ones), restaurants, flights, and performances, they continue to oppose any and all measures to control it. While Rand would have found it problematic that the virus disrupted businesses this way, they refuse to even acknowledge this sad reality. For some people, unwanted facts are unmentionable facts. They prefer a Fantasyland where its still 2020, and they can be heroes, demanding we end the lockdowns right now!

Unsurprisingly, the Brownstone Institute has also been a main driver of anti-vaccine disinformation this pandemic (here, here, here, here). There are doctors who treat facts as completely mutable by pretending the virus poses no real threat to young people, and you can find them at the Brownstone Institute. They are already spewing predictable garbageabout vaccines, Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, and monkeypox. Its no surprise their work is positively received on the website run by anti-vaccine supercrank RFK Jr. Theyre not really that different.

A is not A at the Brownstone Institute. The people who work there arent Howard Roarks.

Despite this, the founder of the Brownstone Institute has been welcome at The Atlas Society, an organization that purports to advance the ideas of Ayn Rand. The Atlas Society also published propaganda praising the pro-virus, anti-vaccine, fabulists behind the GBD and calling their critics alarmist. This article warned of the political hysteria about the virus. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died since its publication, and COVID is aleading medical cause of death in young adults.

Like I said, A is not A.

Unlike Rand, the founder of the Brownstone Institute does not feel the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease. In fact, he pays doctors who convinced politiciansto purposefully infect unvaccinated children and young people, with devastating consequences for many of them. In one of his articles at the Atlas Society, he spread pure anti-vaccine balderdash while boldly anointing himself as a spokesman for healthcare workers- like me- who actually worked on COVID units. Fantasizing that he could speak on our behalf, he said,

They know that nothing beats acquired immunity via exposure. Especially with a coronavirus with a changing profile, a vaccine cannot compare. That is precisely what 100% of the studies have shown since that time. And yet here we have governments imposing the shot on people who took the risk, gained the immunities, and now refuse to take another and potentially more deadly risk from the vaccine that operates not like vaccines of old.

Had he actually spent any time with us, he would have known we did all we could to avoid acquired immunity via exposure. Too many healthcare workers suffered and died because they were unable to do so, including friends of mine. Of course, there is now evidence that viral-induced immunity is far from perfect and that vaccines can lower the reinfection rate in previously infected people.

Doctors saw what the virus could do, we read the studies on the vaccines, and most of us ran to get vaccinated as soon as we could. Nearly 100% of doctors are vaccinated against COVID, and one typical news headline from December 2020 captured our emotions by saying, Healthcare Workers Cry Tears of Joy as Coronavirus Vaccinations Ramp Up: It Feels Great'. No healthcare worker cried tears of joy for acquired immunity via exposure, and only a complete ignoramus or liar would imply otherwise. Either way, A isnt A.

Weve spent the past year pleading with our patients to get vaccinated and caring for those who were misled into thinking that nothing beats acquired immunity via exposure. Some of these people begged for the vaccine after it was too late. Iwonder what concrete steps the founder of the Brownstone Institute took to reap the benefits of acquired immunity via exposure before he was vaccinated. Whatever the answer, its clear were not exactly dealing with a Dr. Karik here.

So why is it that many Objectivists- though not all simultaneously embraced disinformation and undermined heroic scientists whose brilliance saved lives? Im not entirely sure. However, I suspect many of them arent motivated by ideas and values as much as a desire to be contrarian. For some people, like my teenage son, nothing matters more than feeling different and special. Being a free-thinker means nothing more than doing the opposite of whatever they suggest.

If desperate public health officials use restrictions as a last resort, they will reflexively oppose those measures, even though Rand justified them, the morgues were literally overflowing with bodies down the street from where she lived, and theres solid evidence they saved lives. If doctors tell young people to get vaccinated, they will reflexively oppose vaccination, even though many unvaccinated children have died of COVID. And on it goes.

Its possible that Rand would have been a crank this pandemic. Many people I admired surprised me by rejecting the notion that A is A. Its just the flu and its all going away, they said since day #1. So what follows may be wishful thinking.

But Id like to believe that if Rand were here today, shed recognize A is A. Her first mission would be to write a lengthy tribute to Dr. Karik. Since they no longer seem to admire women like Dr. Karik, no Objectivist has done this as far as I know. In fact, many have worked to undermine the fruits of her research. Rand would of course be horrified to learn that a virus killed a million Americans, many thousands of them after a vaccine was available. The worst thing she imagined was a power outage in NYC.

She would have deplored the abuse of healthcare workers at the hands of people who were tricked by articles on the Atlas Society- into thinking that the virus was only dangerous for old, sick people in nursing homes. An expert on violence against healthcare workers recognized that violence is one of the repercussions. of those who downplayed the seriousness of the virus.

Rand would also understand that this COVID denialism is a major reason why so many healthcare workers are leaving the field right now. As one nurse said,

We want to be rooting for our patients. But anyone I know whos working in COVID has zero compassion remaining, especially for people who chose not to get the vaccine.

Rand would have agreed with Dr. Sheetal Rao when she said Physicians are some of the most resilient people out there. When this group of people starts leaving en masse, something is very wrong. After all, resilient people leaving their jobs after being attacked for their virtues is the central theme of Atlas Shrugged, the novel she considered her masterpiece. Though hes not a major character, a doctor was one of the heroes in that book. Rand clearly had a great respect the profession.

Today, healthcare workers are shrugging due to the consequences of disinformation spread by Objectivists. Thats ironic.

Im confident that Rand would be mortified to learn her name was associated with prevaricators who spread fake numbers to minimize a deadly virus and discourage parents from vaccinating their children. She would have abhorred anyone who trashed the genius of Dr. Karik in favor of a virus by saying nothing beats acquired immunity via exposure. You see, theres no consistency with these Objectivists. Its just malignant contrarianism and groupthink from a collective of talkers whove spent the past two years safe behind laptops and in front of cameras. Their disinformation ensured that doctors, who actually worked this pandemic, had a steady supply of gravely ill patients, many of whom who rewarded their knowledge and skill with hate and violence.

Ayn Rand would have seen right through these people.

And though she helped me do the same, Im glad I left that hive mind a long time ago.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist based in New York City who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19.

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Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and COVID - Science Based Medicine

Ayn Rands case for capitalism stands in marked contrast to what might be termed the classical defense of capitalism. Throughout the past 250 years, proponents of capitalism predominantly have sought to justify it on purely politico-economic groundsor by arguing that free, unregulated markets result in the greatest good for the greatest number. Ayn Rand regarded both as losing strategies.

The classical economists attempted a tribal justification of capitalism on the ground that it provides the best allocation of a communitys resources, Rand wrote.1 On her view, this approach is not only insufficient to defend capitalism, it ultimately undermines the quest for liberty.

The crucial problem with the classical economists defense, Rand argued, is that they either ignored moral questions altogether or attempted to defend capitalism on the same moral basis as collectivist social systems: altruism. The basic principle of altruism, she wrote, is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.2 Although she agreed that laissez-faire capitalism is the most efficient politico-economic systemeffectively ensuring the greatest good for the greatest numberRand held that effective advocates of capitalism must emphasize that capitalism is not merely the practical, but the only moral system in history.3

One example of the classical defense of capitalism is the work of Ludwig von Mises. Throughout the 1920s, von Mises resisted the advance of socialism by challenging its adherents, such as Oskar R. Lange and Abba P. Lerner, on politico-economic grounds. Even before publishing some of his most important works, such as Socialism, Liberalism, and Interventionism, von Mises powerfully critiqued key economic premises of statist systems in his 1920 article Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.

In this paper, von Mises convincingly demonstrated that central planning is incompatible with rational economic calculation: The absence of price signals renders rational economic activity impossible and leads to the misallocation of resources. In a free-market economy, prices are determined by the law of supply and demand, and they fulfill two essential functions. First, prices convey information. If a certain material or good becomes scarcer, whether due to decreased supply or increased demand, its price rises, thereby providing entrepreneurs with information vital to making rational economic calculations and running their businesses successfully. Second, prices serve as incentives. Guided by the profit motive, rational entrepreneurs are incentivized to look continuously for investments that yield the highest returns.4

In a planned economy, price signals cannot fulfill either of these crucial functions because government planning replaces market coordination. Prices cannot convey information to businessmen because the central authority, having arbitrarily determined the just price of a given product or material, essentially prevents the law of supply and demand from impacting prices.5 And prices cant serve as incentives because, being dictated by a central authority, they dont reflect the value of products and services as determined by voluntary trade.6

Von Mises pointed out that solving either the information or the incentive problem will not suffice to make socialism work. In the first case, even if the bureaucrats were able to collect the countless pieces of information that price signals convey, a socialist businessman would nonetheless lack the incentive to produce. As von Mises put it:

When a successful business man is appointed the manager of a public enterprise, he may still bring with him certain experiences from his previous occupation, and be able to turn them to good account in a routine fashion for some time. Still, with his entry into communal activity he ceases to be a merchant and becomes as much a bureaucrat as any other placeman in the public employ.7

And in the second case, even if socialists could change human nature and incentivize people to produce with no desire for profit, the entrepreneurs would nonetheless lack the information necessary to engage in rational economic calculation. In von Misess words:

[E]ven if we for the moment grant that these Utopian expectations can actually be realized, that each individual in a socialist society will exert himself with the same zeal as he does today in a society where he is subjected to the pressure of free competition, there still remains the problem of measuring the result of economic activity in a socialist commonwealth which does not permit of any economic calculation. We cannot act economically if we are not in a position to understand economizing.8

Despite these crucial insights, von Mises took pains to emphasize that his politico-economic observations should be considered amoral. For instance, in the conclusion of Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, he stated:

The knowledge of the fact that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth cannot, of course, be used as an argument either for or against socialism. Whoever is prepared himself to enter upon socialism on ethical grounds on the supposition that the provision of goods of a lower order for human beings under a system of common ownership of the means of production is diminished, or whoever is guided by ascetic ideals in his desire for socialism, will not allow himself to be influenced in his endeavors by what we have said.9

On Rands view, such a defense of capitalism is inadequate for precisely this reason: It makes no moral arguments against socialism and thus leaves those prepared to enter upon socialism on ethical grounds free to claim the moral high ground without opposition. In a 1946 letter to Leonard Read, Rand criticized von Misess professedly value free method, which focuses solely on practical considerations of whether a given aim can be reached by certain means. She addressed his methodology in her response to his book, Omnipotent Government:

The great mistake . . . is in assuming that economics is a science which can be isolated from moral, philosophical and political principles, and considered as a subject in itself, without relation to them. It cant be done.

The best example of that is Von Mises Omnipotent Government. That is precisely what he attempted to do, in a very objective, conscientious, scholarly way. And he failed dismally, even though his economic facts and conclusions were for the most part unimpeachable. He failed to present a convincing case because at the crucial points, where his economics came to touch upon moral issues (as all economics must), he went into thin air, into contradictions, into nonsense. He did prove, all right, that collectivist economics dont work. And he failed to convert a single collectivist.10

In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane, also written in 1946, Rand likewise criticized Henry Hazlitt. This time, though, she added an important qualification. She held not only that the classical economists approach is methodologically flawed; their separation of ethics from economics actually strengthens their opponents case for socialism. If proponents of capitalism do not defend it on ethical grounds, attentive readers might reasonably conclude that socialism is morally superior to capitalism. In Rands words:

I think that [Hazlitts Economics in One Lesson] is another case such as that of Ludwig von Mises. Hazlitt tried to divorce economics from ethics. He presented a strictly economic argument, telling how things work out, and carefully omitting to state why the way they work out is properthat is, what principles should properly guide mens actions in the economic field. . . .

This is an example of why I maintain that no book on economics can have real value or importance if economics are divorced from morality. When one attempts to do it, one merely spreads the implications and premises of the collectivist morality and defeats ones case for the more thoughtful readers.11

Rand emphasizes this in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, stating, With very few exceptions, [capitalisms classical defenders and modern apologists] are responsibleby defaultfor capitalisms destruction. The default consisted of their inability or unwillingness to fight the battle where it had to be fought: on moral-philosophical grounds.12

Yet, as Rand realized, the damage to the reputation of capitalism that value free economists caused was almost negligible when juxtaposed with the damage caused by those thinkers who attempted to defend capitalism on traditional, altruistic moral grounds. One exemplar of this latter group is Claude-Frdric Bastiat. Bastiat took pains to stress the detrimental consequences of the supposed moral/practical dichotomy. Toward the end of his article That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, he laments, [F]alse reasoning . . . causes nations to consider their moral and their material interests as contradictory to each other. What can be more discouraging or more dismal?13

A fervent Christian, Bastiat based his ethical conclusions on a mystical worldview. There is no religion which does not thunder against pomp and luxury, he wrote. This is as it should be, and things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that . . . political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree.14 Like many American conservatives today, Bastiat argued that capitalism must be defended on altruistic grounds. According to Bastiat, the moral man is supposed to spend his money not to selfishly acquire luxuries but to selflessly help the poor. A moral man, Bastiat contends,

is touched by the miseries which oppress the poorer classes; he thinks he is bound in conscience to afford them some relief, and therefore he devotes [his money] to acts of benevolence. Amongst the merchants, the manufacturers, and the agriculturists, he has friends who are suffering under temporary difficulties; he makes himself acquainted with their situation, that he may assist them with prudence and efficiency, and to this work he devotes [his money].15

On Rands view, such a justification of capitalism is worse than amoral economic defenses.16 Whereas economists such as von Mises and Hazlitt avoid moral conclusions and so fail to defend capitalism convincingly, altruist/Christian economists such as Bastiat undermine capitalism by leaving their readers with a mess of contradictory premises. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible, Rand points out in For the New Intellectualthey are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.17

A passage from Hazlitts Economics in One Lesson vividly illustrates the detrimental effects of trying to justify capitalism on altruistic grounds. Inspired by Bastiat, Hazlitt analyzes the question of frugality versus luxury, one of the few passages in which Hazlitt touches upon moral issues.18 Taking up the classic example that Bastiat used, Hazlitt reaches the same conclusion as his predecessor, asserting that it is better to give to charitable causes, including help to friends in need, than it is to spend on luxuries for oneself.19 The families who are helped by these funds, Hazlitt contends,

in turn spend them on groceries or clothing or living quarters. So the funds create as much employment as if [he] had spent them directly on himself. The difference is that more people are made happy as consumers, and that production is going more into essential goods and less into luxuries and superfluities.20

Rand dismisses the Bastiat/Hazlitt argument on both moral and politico-economic grounds. In her 1946 letter to Rose Wilder Lane, she wrote:

Hazlitt states that a virtuous, responsible man of wealth should donate to charity and should refrain from buying luxuries, because these take productive resources away from the manufacture of necessities for the poor. . . . That was really a crucial betrayal of our case. It is not true as economics, and it is wrong as morality. It is pure, explicit collectivism.21

On Rands view, either we uphold that man has a moral right to exist for his own sake and to spend his money according to his own preferences, or we accept that man has a moral duty to serve his fellow men and to use or relinquish his money according to their needs. In order to defend capitalism convincingly, Rand held, its advocates must both proudly assert mans inalienable rights and vociferously reject unchosen obligations. As she put it in her Textbook of Americanism:

If you are an Individualist and wish to preserve the American way of life, the greatest contribution you can make is to discard, once and for all, from your thinking, from your speeches, and from your sympathy, the empty slogan of the greatest good for the greatest number. Reject any argument, oppose any proposal that has nothing but this slogan to justify it. It is a booby-trap. It is a precept of pure Collectivism. You cannot accept it and call yourself an Individualist. Make your choice. It is one or the other.22

What many defenders of capitalism have in common is their focus on (the welfare of) the group. Their arguments ultimately rest on what Rand referred to as the tribal premise. The result of irrational and evil philosophical ideas, the tribal premise holds that man

is . . . the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products [and that he] is born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear.23

That premise, Rand emphasized, is shared by . . . the champions of capitalism, and it disarms [them] by a subtle, yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisyas witness, their attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the common good or service to the consumer or the best allocation of resources.24 In order to defend capitalism coherently, its advocates must recognize that it is this tribal premise that has to be checkedand challenged.25

Rand held that the starting point for the justification of capitalism is not the group but the individual, not men but man. In her words, Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of mannot of the loose aggregate known as a communitythat any science of the humanities has to begin.26 The essential difference between Rand and other would-be defenders of capitalism lies in their views of the value of the individual. In contrast to the collectivist approach, which holds that the group is the unit of moral concern, Rand emphasized the importance and primacy of the individual.

She did so on the basis of her conclusions in the more fundamental branches of philosophy. In order to understand what social system is best for man, Rand pointed out, we must understand mans nature and the nature of the world in which we live.

Like other animals, in order to survive, man must attain certain values: food, water, shelter, and so on. Without these values, he dies. Mans nature thereby sets his standard of value: The good is that which promotes his life, and the evil is that which hinders it.

Unlike other animals, though, man is endowed with reason, which enables him to solve the problems of survival and increase his standard of living, whether by taming and using fire, building aqueducts, fashioning clothing, constructing shelter, inventing language, or using concepts to retain and communicate his ever-expanding knowledge. But reason is a faculty of the individual. As Rand wrote:

There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary actthe process of reasonmust be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another.27

So, to live, man must use his mind to create the values on which his life depends. He must consider the whole of his life and act to secure his own long-term, rational self-interest. Rand held that this fact had been obscured by the ethics of altruism, which leads people to a corrupted view of what selfishness means. Most people wrongly equate a selfish person with a cruel narcissist who manipulates and exploits others. In Rands words:

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word selfishness is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual package-deal, which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word selfishness is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.28

But the exact meaning . . . of the word selfishness, Rand emphasized, is: concern with ones own interests.29 And, in fact, its not in anyones interest to become a murderous brute. That leads only to pain and misery.

Likewise, Rand highlighted that altruism had wrongly been elevated to a moral ideal. In marked contrast with selfishness, altruism demands that man must selflessly concern himself with the interests of others. As Rand put it, Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for ones own benefit is evil.30 Rand argued that most people, lured by the idea that altruism is tantamount to benevolence toward others, wrongly equate a selfless altruist with a kind benefactor who compassionately supports his fellow man. What altruism means, though, is that man has a duty to sacrifice himself and his personal interests for the sake of others. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others, she wrote. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrificewhich means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destructionwhich means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.31

By perverting the notion of selfishness and extolling the idea of self-sacrifice, the altruist philosophers effectively set up a false binary. As Howard Roark, the hero of Rands novel The Fountainhead, put it, they forced [man] to accept masochism as his idealunder the threat that sadism was his only alternative.32

To redeem both man and morality, Rand stated, it is the concept of selfishness that one has to redeem.33 In contrast to the altruist philosophers who allege that a selfish man is guided by his emotions and unscrupulously exploits others, Rands ideal man is the rational egoist who strives to realize his highest potential by projecting personal aims into the future and giving form to his ideas. [N]either sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself, Rands virtuous egoist is an independent individualist who respects the rights of others.34

Which brings us to politics: The crucial concept that bridges ethics and politics is rights. On a desert island, the question of rights would not come up. Only when an individual deals with other men does the issue of rights become important. Rights are a moral concept, Rand emphasizes,

the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individuals action to the principles guiding his relationship with othersthe concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social contextthe link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.35

The crucial political question, according to Rand, is whether a government ensures that a man may live according to his nature. The social recognition of mans rational natureof the connection between his survival and his use of reason, Rand wrote, is the concept of individual rights.36 For a society to be moral, Rand held, it must protect individual rights. Because capitalism is the only system that does, it is the only moral politico-economic system.37

Further, protecting individual rights is the only legitimate purpose of government, which it does by barring . . . physical force from social relationships.38 Men, Rand emphasized, have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.39 By always safeguarding and never infringing mans rights, a proper government recognizes and protects mans ability to act on his nature as a rational beingto act on his own judgment, free from coercion, so long as he does not violate the equal rights of others. To recognize individual rights, Rand highlights, means to recognize and accept the conditions required by mans nature for his proper survival.40

Because man needs to keep and use the fruits of his labor to survive, one of the most important functions of government is the protection of property rights. In Rands words:

The right to life is the source of all rightsand the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.41

Taking all these considerations into account, Rand defined capitalism as a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.42

She pointed out that altruism ultimately undermines the case for individual rights. In her words, Americas inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.43 If one takes the greatest good for the greatest number or the common good as ones standardas utilititarians doone may violate individual rights and commit any atrocity, including theft and murder, as long as one can make the collective believe that such an approach is in the publics interest. Rand unpacked this point in her Textbook of Americanism, writing:

If you consider [the slogan of the greatest good for the greatest number] moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory.44

This is why Rand concluded that [a]ny group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate mans rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.45

In sum, Rand agreed with the classical economists that capitalism does result in the greatest good for the greatest number, writing, If concern with poverty and human suffering were the collectivists motive, they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance.46

Yet despite her agreement with the classical economists on this point, Rand held that their defense of capitalism is inadequate and ultimately dangerous because of its implicit acceptance of the tribal premise. In contrast to both the utilitarian and the Christian economists who focus on the welfare of the group, Rand focused on the needs of the individual, on the facts of reality and human nature, proving that capitalism is not merely the practical, but the only moral system in history.47

Bastiat was right in arguing that political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree.48 But this is true only when one adopts a proper morality, one derived from the facts of mans nature and the requirements of his life. Defending capitalism on altruistic groundsor skirting the issue of morality altogether and implying support for altruismseriously undermines the case for capitalism, infecting men with the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites.49 To harmonize morality and political philosophy, nothing less than Ayn Rands ethics of rational self-interest will do.

Martin Hooss is the educational content associate for Students For Libertys New Frontiers of Objectivism program. He holds a masters degree in English literature and classical philology from Trier University, and another in philosophy, politics, and economics from CEVRO Institute.

1. Ayn Rand, What Is Capitalism?, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 2nd ed. (New York: Signet, [1966] 1967), 26.

2. Ayn Rand, Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, [1982] 1984), 83.

3. Rand, Introduction, in Capitalism, ix [emphasis in the original].

4. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, trans. S. Adler (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, [1920] 2012), 823.

5. Cf. von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 2430.

6. Cf. von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 3137.

7. von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 3536.

8. von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 35.

9. von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 48.

10. Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Plume, [1995] 1997), 260 [emphasis in the original]. Rand repeats this conclusion in another letter written the same year, stressing, As an example of the kind of almost I would tolerate, Id name Ludwig von Mises. His book, Omnipotent Government, had some bad flaws, in that he attempted to divorce economics from morality, which is impossible; but with the exception of his last chapter, which simply didnt make sense, his book was good, and did not betray our cause. The flaws in his argument merely weakened his own effectiveness, but did not help the other side (308).

11. Rand, Letters, 331 [emphasis added].

12. Rand, Introduction, in Capitalism, viii.

13. Cf. Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), ix; Claude F. Bastiat, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, The Bastiat Collection, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, [1850] 2011), 41.

14. Bastiat, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, 41, 43.

15. Bastiat, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, 4344.

16. I do not mean to suggest that economists such as von Mises and Hazlitt were not concerned with ethical questions. Von Misess 1956 treatise The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality and Hazlitts 1964 monograph The Foundations of Morality prove that both of these economists held clearly defined moral convictions. Yet, both clearly separated their economic ideas from their ethical views.

17. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, in For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Signet, [1961] 1963), 54.

18. Cf. Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 19094.

19. Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 190, 192.

20. Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 192.

21. Rand, Letters, 331 [emphasis added].

22. Ayn Rand, Textbook of Americanism, in The Ayn Rand Column, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Schwartz (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, [1991] 1998), 91.

23. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 10.

24. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 5.

25. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 5 [emphasis in the original].

26. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 5 [emphasis in the original].

27. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (London: Penguin, [1943] 2007), 711.

28. Ayn Rand, Introduction, in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, [1964] 2014), vii.

29. Rand, Introduction, in Virtue of Selfishness, vii [emphasis in the original].

30. Rand, Introduction, in Virtue of Selfishness, viii [emphasis in the original].

31. Rand, Faith and Force, 8384 [emphasis in the original].

32. Rand, The Fountainhead, 713.

33. Rand, Introduction, in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, x [emphasis in the original].

34. Ayn Rand, Introducing Objectivism, in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: Meridian, 1990), 4.

35. Rand, Mans Rights, in The Virtue of Selfishness, 108.

36. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 9 [emphasis in the original].

37. Rand, What Is Capitalism?, 10.

38. Rand, The Nature of Government, in The Virtue of Selfishness, 126.

39. Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in The Virtue of Selfishness, 36 [emphasis in the original].

40. Rand, The Nature of Government, 126.

41. Rand, Mans Rights, 110.

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Ayn Rand vs. Classical Economists - The Objective Standard

Things are bleak, but we put our hope in Georgia's gubernatorial candidate Kandiss "Jesus Guns Babies" Taylor, who like a fierce cross (thank you Jesus) between Ayn Rand, Elmer Gantry and Bill Hader's Stefon, has vowed to push out elitists and solar farms, stand up to the Luciferian Cabal, bring the Satanic Regime to its knees and end "the perversions of the furry culture," especially after one killed all those people in Buffalo. She fits right in at next week's GOP Georgia primary. In 2018, their candidate campaigned in a "deportation bus" - "Fill this bus with illegals" - before going to jail for insurance fraud; this year's candidates are all fighting to out-trash the "woke mob." The front-runner is incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp; behind him is Trump-endorsed David Perdue; Taylor's in third place, and endorsed by Roger Stone and the Pillow Guy, so what could go wrong? Polls show her with up to 5% of the vote, but her fans call those numbers "an outrage," "totally illegal!" and a plot by the ghost of Hugo Chavez: "These evil people will stop at nothing!" Also, one suggests the "global pandemic treaty will be amended this month, and it will be used by the WHO to prevent the elections." But if they're held, she'll definitely win.

A Georgia native and "educator," shewrites that when she earned a PhD in counseling she was inspired (sic) by commencement speaker Ben Carson's notion of "citizen servants," and "felt led by the Lord to run for office because I wont bend my knee to tyranny." She says "we have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House" so we need "a full forensic audit" of the 2020 election; we must "take dominion over what God's given us" to "evict the Devil and global elitists," including Soros; she's "not a big womens empowerment person," but "I belong to Jesus - I'm bought and paid for with His blood." On Georgia: "We love each other...We stop for funerals." On our biggest problems: Gas prices, the 2020 election, masks and mandates, solar farms: "Who's making the money? (Are we) in deals with China? And the land is going to be feral (sic) because of the chemicals." On police: "I want to see communities take themselves back...In inner cities, stop the crime and breaking in windows and killing the elderly." On guns: "That's how we're free...Show me the research where crimes are committed with armed people." Does she want CRT, social-emotional learning, sex education in schools? "Absolutely not. It teaches oppression, communism and sexual perversion."

Her campaign bus, unveiled in February, spoke volumes. So did the breathless announcement earlier this month of an "Executive Order 10" that would "rock the nation." And it did. Declaring herself "the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal," she vowed, "I will bring the Satanic Regime to its knees - and DEMOLISH the Georgia Guidestones." Said Guidestones are a large, weird, Stonehenge-like monolith erected in 1980 by some eccentric who evidently thought the world was ending. It's inscribed with tenets: Maintain humanity in balance with nature. Rule passion with tempered reason. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. Prize truth, beauty, love, seeking harmony with the infinite. Be not a cancer on the Earth - Leave room for nature. Most are reasonable, but open to interpretation. QAnon cranks decided it's a Satanic monument to human sacrifice revealing the evil plans of the New World Order. In a feverish video, Taylor goes there: Vaccines, the unborn, lockdowns, humiliation rituals, the Global Luciferian Regime: "They told us it was coming. It's a battle far greater than what we see in (unintelligible)." And on her first day as Governor, "I will move to DEMOLISH the Demonic plans of our enemy. The Satanic agenda is NOT welcome in our state." Can we get an Amen?

Even cooler than how "we will not be kneeling ourselves to a globalist Luciferian regime that has overtaken our nation," Taylor vows, "The furry days are over when I'm governor." As noted on the radio program of wingnut Stew Peters, "The Feds knew about the (Buffalo) shooter, who was a mentally-disturbed 'furry,' and they let it happen... A sick and demented furry did it." He noted that the shooter had posted a cartoon dog on his livestream and gratefully added, "When Kandiss Taylor is elected governor, GA will be furry-free." Taylor echoed him on Facebook, noting that, even before the massacre, she'd written an "executive order" for a dress code that would ban "furry" attire, but "received blowback for tackling the perversions of the furry culture." Shame on the blowbackers: "Twisting the minds of Generation Z MUST END!" Her fans shrieked in outraged agreement: Litter boxes! Students can answer questions with a meow or woof! There's a furry dating show! Father God, please make these crooked paths STRAIGHT for Your Glory in the Mighty Name of Jesus! It's a false flag from the CIA! They want to cause "division's" and they want our GUNS! GOD HELP US TURN FROM WICKED WAYS! This is TOO MUCH! Man, we know, right? Holy mother of God, we can't wait for blessed, bonkers, theocratic governance by Republicans.

Continued here:

Opinion | Demolishing the Demonic Plans of Our Enemy, and Can We Get An Amen - Common Dreams

Several decades ago, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Duncan Scott worked with Ayn Rand to restore the 1942 Italian film adaptation of her first novel, We the Living. Set during the Russian Revolutiona period that Rand witnessed firsthandWe the Living shows how a totalitarian state makes human life impossible. Scott is now preparing a newly restored high-definition edition of the movie. Using state-of-the-art technology, Scott went frame by frame, removing scratches, dirt, and other flaws accumulated while the film was stored. His goal is to bring this extraordinary film to todays viewers in its full glory.

This interview came largely from Scotts appearance on OSIs podcast The Hero Show and contains spoilers for We the Living.

Robert Begley: I first met you in 1988 at a private screening of We the Living in New York City, a few months before it initially hit theaters. Then I bought it on VHS, then DVD when it came out in those formats. Im a huge fan and was thrilled to hear you speak in Charlotte last November about your project to restore this movie. Why dont you start with how the film came about?

Duncan Scott: Thank you, Robert. The way this movie got made is a big irony, and there were a lot of ironies involved in its production. But the first and biggest was that We the Living was semiautobiographical, drawn heavily from Rands own life growing up in Russiayet here is a movie made without her input, permission, or knowledge. She didnt find out about it until long after it was released. Its really amazing that something like that could happen.

One reason is because America was at war with Italy. The filmmakers should not have adapted this book because they had no mechanism for getting the rights to it. But they said, Lets go ahead and make the movie anyway, and well sort things out later. That was the way the associate producer put it to me when I met him many years later.

Begley: Take us back to Italy. How did the project start?

Scott: A minor hero in this story was the daughter of the head of Scalera Studios; I believe her name was Margherita. She read the book, which was fairly popular in Italy when it was published by Baldini and Castoldi-Milan in 1936. She thought it would make a great movie, so she talked to her father and the people at the studio. There was some concern about it because of its antiauthoritarian themes, which obviously wouldnt sit well with the fascist government. It could get people into trouble. But the filmmakers thought that if they made it carefully and avoided the most controversial issues, it would be OK.

Begley: How did they plan to get around Mussolinis fascist censors?

Scott: This is another of the ironies: Mussolinis own son, Vittorio, advocated for the film and helped move things along. The fascists controlled the Italian movie industry, as well as every other industry, so every movie that went into production had to be approved by them.

You might ask, Well, how did the filmmakers think they could get away with it? Russia was a wartime enemy of Italy, and the fascists thought that anything showing communists in a bad light was good propaganda. So, the filmmakers thought they could take advantage of this.

Fortunately, the authorities didnt look much deeper than its anticommunist message. What they did was come to the editing room each day when the dailies (the footage that was shot the previous day) were delivered.

The filmmakers would shoot a scene that they thought was somewhat controversial, but when the authorities came the next day to look at it, the editors tucked away the controversial scene and showed them other footage. The authorities had a rough idea of how much of a movie gets shot every day, and they would say, Wait a minute, is that all there is? Didnt you shoot more yesterday? No. Thats all there is, they would say.

So, there was a lot of finagling and getting around the censors by hiding footage throughout the production process. Most important, they put back these controversial scenes right before the film opened at the 1942 Venice Film Festival.

Thats when all hell broke loose.

Begley: Excellent. Well get to how all hell broke loose in a minute, but can you first give some specific names: the director, writer, actors?

Scott: Yes. The director, Alfredo Alessandrini, was well established. He had done some films that were sympathetic to fascismI think a lot of people went along with fascism to save their careers, and perhaps thats what he was doing. But he was very excited about doing this movie. They brought in a couple of writers who were big names in Italy to write the script while Alessandrini was away finishing another movie. But when he came back and saw the script, he said, This is hopeless.

The writers had liberally changed major aspects of the story. For instance, they changed Kira, the heroine, from wanting to be an engineer who builds bridges to wanting to be a ballerina. Such changes showed Alessandrini that the writers didnt understand the character, so he didnt even give them a chance to rewrite the script. He said, Im throwing this out. Were going to work with a new script. But they were ready to go into production. The sets were built. The actors were hired, and the clock was ticking.

Then he asked Anton Majano, with whom he had worked closely, to do it. Majano was the associate producer on the film, and he wore many hats. I met Majano in Rome, and he told me a lot of this backstory. He is a hero without whom we wouldnt have this film today.

Given that they had to begin filming, Majano simply took the book and started writing a script that was taken nearly word for word from Rands dialogue, often finishing any given portion just a day or two before they filmed it. There was no time to make big changes, which was fortunate. They had to stick closely to the book.

Begley: I would imagine that this was difficult for the actors.

Scott: If they get their pages a day or two in advance, its usually OK. But it was getting hard to track how long the movie was becoming. They kept filming and filming, getting enough material for way more than one movie. In fact, the original version of We the Living was released as two films, Noi Vivi and Addio Kira. However, they didnt tell the actors theyd decided to make two films. They just went ahead and filmed it, because otherwise, theyd have had to pay the actors more money. Lead actors Rossano Brazzi (who plays Leo Kovalensky) and Alida Valli (Kira Argounova) caught on. They went on a mini-strike and stopped working for a few days. The studio came around, negotiated more money, and everything got back on track.

Begley: How did the new script get past the fascist authorities?

Scott: To make it more acceptable, the authorities inserted outright propaganda into some of the dialogue. Its a small percentage of the script, and the way it was inserted was clumsy and obvious to anyone watching.

Begley: I can imagine how Ayn Rand would have reacted to that. You mentioned that all hell broke loose when it was released in Italy. What happened?

Scott: Audiences flocked to see it because they realized that, not only is it anticommunist, but it is antitotalitarian. They saw similarities between it and their own lives. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, won the Biennale Prize, and was acclaimed right out of the gate. It received many amazing reviews, except for a few that called out its antiauthoritarian themes. Nevertheless, it went right into theaters and was enormously successful. A reviewer described it as a colossus of Italian cinema. It was like their version of Gone with the Wind. It had a huge impact across the whole country. People had to go to the theaters twice, because it was released as two movies, but they loved it. They admired the characters so much that they were naming their children Kira and Leo.

The public recognized the antiauthoritarian themes faster than the government did. There was a lot of sly nudging and winking about what the movie was really saying. It came to be known as the film of elbows in the dark. Noi Vivi translates to We the Living, but people would jokingly refer to it as We the Dead. Addio Kira translates to Goodbye Kira, but they would joke that it should be called Goodbye Lira, the currency of Italy at that time. Inflation and poverty were severe, and the story brought people together in their disgust at the government.

The government soon recognized it as dangerous. The movie had been out for a few months and was doing enormous business when Mussolini personally ordered that it be banned. It was to be removed from the theaters, and all the prints and negatives were to be destroyed. There would be nothing left.

Yet, We the Living was still the number one box office film in Italy that yearamazing given that it was pulled from the theaters right at the height of its success.

Begley: Obviously, they failed to destroy all the prints and negatives. What happened?

Scott: Majano and the general manager of Scalera Films, Massimo Ferrara, said, We have to save this film. They sent in the prints of the film to be destroyed, but they took the original negatives to the home of Franco Magli, the production manager, who hid them in his basement. They had to send in negatives to be destroyed, so they sent those of another film that they didnt value as highly, hoping that the fascists wouldnt notice. Majano, Ferrara, and Magli hoped the authorities wouldnt put the film in a projector, as thats not typically done with negatives. They took tremendous personal risk, knowing that had they been caught defying Mussolinis orders, it would have been bad.

Fortunately, the negatives stayed safely hidden for the rest of the war. For many of those involved, it was the last film they worked on during the war. Some refused to work under the fascist authorities. Brazzi had already been doing some work with the Italian Resistance, which was an antifascist underground movement. He left the movie industry and went full-time working with the Resistance. By 1943, filmmaking in Italy had ground to a halt.

Brazzi certainly was a hero for working with the Resistance. He had several close calls and was imprisoned more than once. He feared that hed be executed, but fortunately, he was released.

I know someone whos writing a biography of Brazzi and his role with the underground. Amazingly, much of that story has not been told before. Such a famous actor, who was a part of the Italian resistance, risking his life to fight against the fasciststalk about heroism.

Begley: Both Brazzi and Valli had some degree of success in America afterward. What happened to them and the film after the Allies defeated the fascists?

Scott: In the years immediately following the war and before the studio went out of business, the producers sent Brazzi and Valli to meet Ayn Rand, to persuade her to give them the rights to release the movie in Italy.

At the time, Rand didnt want it to be rereleased, not because she didnt like the movie, but because she had been approached by a Hollywood studio to do an English-language version. That never came to fruition, but she did later see the Italian film. She loved itparticularly Vallis performance.

Begley: I love how Valli captures Kiras fierce independence and her quest for liberty.

Scott: Vallis performance is infused with so much power, possibly because she tapped into dramatic events going on in her life at the time. She had been in a romantic relationship with a pilot who was in the war. In the weeks leading up to filming, his plane was shot down, and he was killed. I think she was drawing from these intense emotions in her performance. If you look at her other movies, shes excellent in pretty much every one of thembut nothing like what you see in We the Living. One of her English-language films that people might watch for comparison is The Third Man. Its a classic, starring Valli alongside Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

However, when Rand declined to have the film released, Scalera Studio put it away. In 1952, the studio went out of business, and the negatives of We the Living and all their other films were sold. Then the archive of films was sold again. At that point, We the Living was effectively losteven as the novel was becoming a classic in America.

Begley: Is this when Henry and Erika Holzer got involved?

Scott: Yes, they were the ones who saved the film from oblivion. They were associates of Ayn Rand, and Henry was her lawyer. One day, Rand mentioned that there was a movie version of We the Living. The Holzers were shocked; nobody knew that a movie of Rands first novel had been made. They asked her what happened to it. At least twenty years had passed since she had been approached about the rights, and she hadnt heard anything since. As far as she knew, it was long gone.

So, the Holzers made it their mission to go to Italy and see if they could find this movie. Keep in mind, this was the late 1960s. There was no internet, no easy way to do this kind of research. Even making phone calls to Italy was expensive. They ended up searching for it for the better part of two years, making multiple trips to Italy. It was real detective work. They eventually tracked down the negatives, which were packed away in an obscure storage facility but were still in great shape. The Holzers saw enough of the negatives to know theyd found it, and they bought it on the spot. The company that owned the film didnt understand how valuable it was.

Begley: So, they came back to America with the film. Is this where you come into the picture?

Scott: Yes. I was in my early twenties when I discovered Rand. Late one night, I just happened to see her on Johnny Carsons The Tonight Show. She appeared on his program three times in 1967. I caught the first one, on August 11, and got goosebumps because she was saying all these things that I believed but couldnt then articulate. Of course, she put it all together in her brilliant manner.

Carson canceled his remaining guests so Rand could keep talking. I found it amazing that shed be allowed to speak for twenty to thirty minutes on a late-night talk show.

After that I had to find out more about this woman. I read all her works, then attended some lectures at the Nathaniel Branden Institute, where Rand would sometimes appear. There was also a monthly publication called The Objectivist, with various articles by her and others associated with her. In the back of the magazine there were announcements. In one issue [June 1968], I read that there was a long-lost movie version of We the Living that had been rediscovered and brought back to America by the Holzers. It was going to be edited and prepared for release in America. So, I did something very out of character for me at that age. I was maybe twenty-two, early in my film career, with no established name, but I offered to work on this project.

Right after I sent them a letter, I started doubting myself, saying, What am I doing? Theyll never pick me, Im only twenty-two! Weeks went by, and I thought, theyre going to ignore my letter. Then the Holzers reached out to me. I met them at their office in the Empire State Building, and they told me there had been someone who was going to work on the project but now wasnt. They liked the idea of me working on it. So, in very short order I was brought on. One of the first things we had to do was play the film for Rand and her circle of associates, jokingly called the collective. We set up a screening in the studio of the film company where I was an editor at the time.

One evening I set up a dozen or so chairs and circled them around a machine called a Moviola, which had a tiny, maybe five-inch screen meant for one person to view.

You can imagine seeing Rand and the collective all huddled around this little Moviola, watching the film one ten-minute reel at a time. Mind you, it hadnt been edited in any way, so it ran for four hoursplus the time it took to change reels. So, the whole thing took more than five hours, but nobody complained even once. Everyone looked at each other awestruck as we ended each reel and went to the next. It was really quite something to see. There were no subtitles, so Erika stood to the side of the Moviola with a script that had English on one side of the page and Italian on the other. She read the dialogue in English as it played, often having to read faster or slower when she discovered the dialogue was out of sync with the movie.

That was the first time Rand saw the film since the late 1940s when the studio had arranged a screening for her. And it was the first time any of the others had seen it, so it was quite an event.

Everybody was impressed with it, even seeing it under those circumstances. There were a lot of remarks about how handsome Brazzi was in the role of Leo, and, of course, it goes without saying that Valli was both pretty and fabulous as Kira. Fosco Giachetti, who played Andrei, was older than the character Rand depicted in the book. Despite that, she thought he did an amazing job.

As someone who has watched this movie time and time again, Ive come to appreciate what Giachetti does with this role. Andrei has the biggest arc through the story. He is a rigid communist ideologue and doesnt question it at all at the beginning of the movie. But you see this transformation over time and the pain that it causes him as he gradually realizes that everything he devoted his life to is corrupt and evil and that hell never have Kiras love. Your heart breaks for him by the end of the movie.

Begley: What was it like to sit with Rand and go through the film together?

Scott: We worked in a small editing room, always in the evening, after dinnertime. Because it was after hours, we were the only ones there, and it was quiet. We sat together in front of a small film editing table surrounded by tall metal racks packed with pizza-size film cans. Id dim the lights, and wed sit shoulder to shoulder going through the film scene by scene. Id mount a reel of the movie on a hand-cranked rewinder, thread it through a small viewer to an empty reel on another rewinder, and slowly wind through the film, stopping and starting, going back and forth. We had that Italian and English script so we could figure out the dialogue, but it was slow going. I was very impressed, but not surprised, at how focused Ayn was. She made decisions about the editing with no hesitation. We rarely talked about anything but the film. I do remember one time she enjoyed hearing that my daughter, Samantha, had just been born. Ayn was warm and easy to work with, and although I was nervous before our first meeting, I was comfortable throughout the rest of our sessions.

Overall, she thought that the core story of the three charactersKira, Leo, and Andreiwas beautifully done. This was the main focus in the editing process; we edited out some subplots and other characters who werent necessary.

There were problems that had to be solved. For instance, in the novel, Andrei kills himself when he realizes the crushing and brutal reality of the ideal that he had held all his life. But in the original movie, instead of Andrei killing himself, the secret police send over a squad and execute him in his apartment.

Rand said Andrei must commit suicide: It was important to understanding his character. We had to find a way to fix this just with editing because, of course, we couldnt go out and shoot new scenes. In the end we did find a way to make it look like he commits suicide. We see Andrei looking forlorn, staring into his fireplace. He picks up the nightgown he had tried to give to Kira but she had refused and tosses it into the fire. He picks up a gun and contemplates killing himself. In the original movie, he puts the gun back down. Then the secret police burst into his apartment and kill him. So, what we did is get rid of all that business with the secret police. We cut away from Andrei while he is still holding the gun and go to his view of the fireplace where Kiras nightgown is going up in flames. We hold on that, and then bangwe hear the sound of a gunshot. Hes killed himself.

Rand was quite happy with that solution. It was an amazing experience to work with her.

She really understood the editing process. Nowadays everybody has film editing software on their computers, but were talking about a period when most people had no idea what film editors did. She was savvy about it. It helped that she had worked in Hollywood years earlier.

Begley: What happened during the 1970s, and up to Rands death in 1982?

Scott: We were in a holding pattern for a long time. I completed the editing she had asked me to do. However, it was hard for her to find the time to continue working on the film, and nobody wanted to proceed without her because she said she wanted to stay involved. But she had so many other things that were drawing her attention. She was still writing, she was aging, and Franks health was failing, so we didnt push anything. What we thought might be months turned into years. But the Holzers and I agreed that because this movie was initially made without her involvement, we absolutely were not going to continue without her involvement as long as she wanted to stay involved.

Unfortunately, that never happened. After she passed away, Henry had a conversation with Leonard Peikoff, the inheritor of Rands estate. He agreed that we should finish the film and get it out. It was almost ready to go anyway. All that was left was work on the subtitles. Erika spent countless hours comparing the translation of the Italian movie with dialogue in the book. She made sure everything was true to the book, even if it meant that maybe the subtitles werent exactly accurate to what the actors were saying. It was more important that it be true to the novel, and we went over it time and time again to confirm this.

Begley: We are now nearing the eightieth anniversary of its original release. Last November, in Charlotte, you showed clips, side by side, of the 1942 version and the restored version. Can you tell us about the restoration?

Scott: Yes, Im going through every single frame and cleaning up the images. The movie was filmed in 35mm, which is very high resolution. Our first release of the film in 1988, although sharp, had scratches, dirt, and other things printed into the film from the negatives that had been in storage. We didnt have all the wonderful digital tools that we have now, where software can go in and recognize whats a spot of dirt and whats a scratch, and remove it, like magic. So those flaws remained in all its releases.

When I realized that the anniversary of the film was approaching, I made a high-definition scan of it to increase the resolution, but, of course, there was the issue of the dirt and scratches, and a few other problems as well. So, I decided that for this milestone, wed do an eightieth anniversary edition and go through everything.

It was an enormous jobmuch bigger than I originally thought. But Im really thrilled that we did it. I think it must look nearly as good as it did when it first opened at the Venice Film Festival in 1942.

Were currently working on a major event in Italy to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of its opening. I cant say that its definite yet, but were working on that. At any rate, the anniversary edition is coming out this year, and it will be beautiful. Youll be able to stream it on several platforms.

Begley: Well, thank you for doing all this work, Duncan. This heroic, single-handed task of restoration is the latest stage of the arc that started with Rand, progressed with the Italian filmmakers, then the Holzers, and then you. You mentioned how much time and effort it took, and I imagine that means money as well. How can our readers help promote this film?

Scott: Thank you, Robert. We have an extensive website, WeTheLivingMovie.com, where people can see restoration clips and other updates.

One of the things thats really important, and I hope people recognize this, is that you can make a great film or restore one, but people might not see it if you dont put a lot of time, effort, and money into promotion and advertising. On the site, we have information about how to help. Im hoping people who are fans of Rand and the film will help us bring it to the rest of the world. Once we get it onto a streaming platform, anyone, anywhere in the world can watch it, so we just need to get the word out. Thats the next big thing.

Begley: Thank you very much, Duncan. I hope this film gets as wide an audience as possible, because Rands message of individualism over collectivism is as relevant as ever.

Scott: Thank you, Robert.

Robert Begley is director of development at Objective Standard Institute, where he also teaches courses integrating philosophy and self-development principles. In addition, Begley is a speaking coach, helping TedX speakers and businessmen deliver more memorable messages.

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Ayn Rand's We the Living: Back on the Silver Screenand Better Than Ever - The Objective Standard

Congress working president Sonia Gandhi sounded confident at the party strategy meeting (Chintan Shivir) in Udaipur in Rajasthan on Sunday. "We will overcome, we will overcome, we will overcome. That is our determination, that's our Sankalp," she said.

The grand old party has tried many things after losing office in 2014alliances (UP, Karnataka), Rightward turn (remember Rahul Gandhi's temple run and assertion of his Brahmin lineage?), Leftward turn (induction of Kanhaiya Kumar).

But Sonia Gandhi has not given up. She has announced a national Kashmir to Kanyakumari 'Bharat Jodo yatra' that is scheduled to start on Gandhi Jayanti (October 2). "All of us will participate in it. The Yatra is to strengthen the bonds of social harmony that are under stress, to preserve the foundational values of our Constitution that are under assault and to highlight the day-to-day concerns of crores of our people," she said.

The district-level Jan Jagran Abhiyan, which started earlier, will resume on June 15. "This extensive campaign will highlight economic issues, especially the growing unemployment and intolerable price rise that is destroying livelihoods," she said.

While her endeavors are admirable, one has to be an ardent Congress support to pin hopes in these programmes. But such activities are akin to cosmetic treatment, whereas the disease is much more serious, necessitating serious thinking. In fact, rethinking.

The American philosopher-author Ayn Rand famously said, "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." Maybe it's time for the GOP to check their fundamental premise, a dogma actually: the Nehru-Gandhi family is the soul of the Congress; the party can't exist without the family. Karnataka Congress chief DK Shivakumar recently said, "Without the Gandhi family, the Congress party cannot stay united. They are key for the unity of the Congress party... It is impossible for the Congress to survive without the Gandhi family." About two years ago, senior party leader and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh had said, "Congress party's leadership isn't possible without the Nehru-Gandhi family."

Even the so-called rebels haven't revolted against the family but its weird ways. There was a news report on March 14 that when Sonia Gandhi told the Congress Working Committee that "we three" (she, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra) are ready to "step back" if it is felt the leadership lacks steadiness, the gathering of elite party members and eliciting a unanimous chorus rejecting the offer. "Sources said the entire gathering, including Ghulam Nabi Azada leading light of the 'rebel G-23'said 'no' and urged Sonia to continue," the report said.

Congress leaders ought to discard this dogma. They should remember that Lal Bahadur Shastri and PV Narasimha Rao served (unlike Manmohan Singh) as prime minister without the family's blessings and guidance. Narasimha Rao is one of the greatest prime ministers India ever had; Shastri too, belying fears, did pretty well.

Today India is a major economy primarily because Narasimha Rao liberalized the economy, dispensing with a variety of controls and making it possible for the entrepreneurial energies to be released. In the domain of foreign policy too, his interventions were no less important, though they are rarely acknowledged. He normalised diplomatic relations with Israel.

Shastri instilled pride and confidence in a nation that was militarily battered and psychologically shattered after the India-China war in 1962. He stood against the belligerence of Pakistan, giving President Ayub Khan a bloody nose.

In a nutshell, the two non-dynasty prime ministers from the Congress proved to very competent and effective leaders in difficult times. It will take a leap of faith for the senior GOP leaders to break the shackles of the dynasty. But that is a sine non qua of Congress revival. They should also remember that the Bharatiya Janata Party's success is also because of the fact that it is the only major party that is not a family enterprise.

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Congress revival: Time to break free of family - The Hans India

During the Middle Ages, a group of men tried to turn base metals into gold; they were known as alchemists and they did not succeed in their endeavors. Were fortunate that they didnt. Why? Consider the alternative.

Had the alchemists found a way to transmute base metals such as lead into the monetary unit of the time, a race would have kicked off. A race to find as many metals as possible to turn into gold.

The first users of this newly created gold would have enjoyed tremendous wealth, but as it circulated throughout the economy a much smaller sphere of opportunity in the Middle Ages calamity would have ensued.

Those with less personal or political connection to alchemists would have found themselves outside of any market economy. They would no longer be able to bid on goods and services. The price in gold terms would simply be too high.

It would have created the ultimate boom-and-bust cycle. Given where economic development was at the time, that could have prolonged the Dark Ages by hundreds of years.

While considered part of the lore of the Middle Ages, the work of alchemists in experimenting and documenting their results paved the way toward the scientific method of discovery. In other words, they failed at their primary goal, yet they found something that would be far more valuable for mankind.

Where the alchemists failed in trying to create value from something out of lesser value, a group of people in the 20th century found success. These modern alchemists are known as central bankers.

The early 1970s saw a surge in inflation and commodity prices, much like today. Dollar printing had been persistent for years, also much like today. With the end of money having any tie to relatively limited gold, any pretense of responsibility flew out the window. Price increases were the name of the game and Americans, able to own precious metals again, did so in droves. They sent the price of gold from $268 per ounce to over $2,400. The more accessible silver went from $9 to over $130.

Buying of stock in a silver-trading company, Bache, was halted in 1980 to get a curb on rising silver prices. (Had the billionaire Hunt brothers not used leverage to buy their later silver holdings, theres no telling how high the price could have gone.)

The age of financial alchemy reached its height in the early 1990s. Inflation was tamed by a sharp rise in interest rates and a necessary recession. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan a former acolyte of Ayn Rand and gold bug became the face of the managed economy.

In one of his numerous appearances before Congress, he once stated, I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but Im not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Policymakers loved the Greenspan era. It was a time of relatively easy money, relatively little monetary turbulence, and it made it easy to promise ever-growing government programs with no seeming long-term cost. Those all added up to easy re-elections.

It was not to last forever.

Greenspan created market risk in his first year as Fed Chairman. There was a massive rally at the start of 1987, but there was a brutal correction in October. On October 22, 1987, the Dow dropped 22% in a single day.

Unsurprisingly, Greenspan came out to note that the Fed stood by ready to ensure that capital markets flowed smoothly. Markets interpreted this as a greenlight to assume that the Fed would intervene if a market drop was big enough.

With programs like 401k plans on the rise, it was no surprise that such a backstop would be needed even if it kicked off the mother of all bubbles over a number of decades in the process.

Greenspan held interest rates low throughout the late 1990s. Tech stocks formed a massive bubble and burst. Then housing burst. The Greenspan put changed names as new Fed Chairs came into the role. As Greenspan was retiring in 2006, the seeds had been sown for the start of the bursting of a bubble in housing, but it was also a time where a number of technologies were coming along that could free the world from the boom-and-bust cycle being exacerbated by central bankers.

The past 50 years of a global fiat system have had a poor track record. Boom, bubble, bust. Boom, bubble, bust.

Central bankers, armed with advanced degrees, have shown that they only know how to do two things: print money or print less money.

Attempts to lightly rein in the Feds balance sheet in 2019 had to be quickly reversed when financial markets started to show strain even a few months before the world heard of COVID-19.

The past 51 years has been a financial Dark Age of quantitative easing, currency debasements and the financialization of the economy at the expense of other sectors. Added on top of the remnant of the gold standard before that, most of mankind has been at the whim of an unelected few holding power based on academic credentials and theories, rather than by the consent of the market.

As a result, its been a global free-for-all.

Some countries, like Argentina and Zimbabwe, have had a hyperinflationary collapse. Others, such as Japan, have tried stimulus programs to get their economy moving, only to find that theyre pushing on a string. Still other countries, like El Salvador, have been pegged to the U.S. dollar and have found relative stability, but without the freedom to control their own financial destiny.

In late 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was released. The timing of the paper was inspired by the plan to inject hundreds of billions of dollars to stabilize the bubble rather than let it collapse. Those numbers now seem quaint in the age of trillion-dollar stimulus programs a mere 14 years later.

But Bitcoin is hope.

It is hope for the globally unbanked. It is hope for those who have had their wealth confiscated by government officials, whether directly by force or through the indirect theft of inflation and hyperinflation.

The Bitcoin protocol guarantees only 21 million will ever be mined. The 19 millionth Bitcoin was recently mined and several million may have already been lost from a poor understanding of the value of the asset. No matter what the final number is, the key is immutability.

We now live in a world where the printing press has given way to direct-deposit stimulus checks, And where the possibility of robots mining asteroids could crater the price of precious metals in just a few decades.

Its clear no other asset class can truly be said to have a cap on its scarcity.

Already, a thriving community has grown around Bitcoin, exploring its potential in fields such as art, philosophy and human rights. For what was simply described as a peer-to-peer electronic payment system has far more to it than meets the eye.

Welcome to the financial renaissance. The age of financial alchemy wont go down without a fight, but with Bitcoin, the chance to build a new system exists while leaving the old to wither on its own.

This is a guest post by Andrew Packer. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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The Financial Dark Ages Are Ending Thanks To Bitcoin - Bitcoin Magazine

Its time we clear the ambiguity over the issue of marital rape. Either we decide to acknowledge it and make it a criminal offence, or we decide to exempt it from judicial scrutiny is a choice that the legislature and judiciary have to make

The personal is political became a rallying cry of the second-wave feminism that took place in Europe. The adage tended to address the gender disparity in terms of structural inequality. The personal experiences of women were said to have links with political and social structures which in turn impacted their interpersonal space. When analysed beyond the legal framework, marriage is essentially an institution that operates in an interpersonal space. It is sanctified by social mores, shielded from any outside interference through societal norms, and decorated and celebrated with a halo of sacredness.

However, this sacred institution faces tough scrutiny when profanities of a crime like rape enter its sanctified territory.

The judiciary and legislature in India for decades have been grappling with the question that whether acknowledging and penalising marital rape would amount to overreach or not, and whether it amounts to an invasion of the personal space of its citizen.

Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which defines rape exempts forceful sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife from being categorised as rape, provided the wife is above 18 years of age. And, it is this exception that has been challenged before the court on several occasions.

The Law Commission of India when confronted with this issue, in its 172nd report titled review of the rape laws, published in 2000, clearly stated that it was not satisfied that [marital rape] exception should be recommended to be deleted since that may amount to excessive interference with the marital relationship.

Now, Delhi High Court on 11 May, delivered its verdict on the bunch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the exception granted to marital rape in the IPC. The division bench consisting of Justices Rajiv Shakdher and Hari Shankar gave a split judgement, with Justice Rajiv Shakdher declaring the exception to marital rape as enshrined in Section 375 Indian Penal Code as unconstitutional and Justice Hari Shankar upholding the constitutional validity of the exception clause.

With this split judgment and consensus on the point that substantial questions of law are involved, it is the Supreme Court that will decide on this issue now.

Those seeking to make marital rape a punishable offence argue that the exception provided under Section 375 of IPC to the marital rape stems from the doctrine of overture which makes women subservient to men post marriage.

Another argument made by the those who want to make marital rape a legal offence is that it is violative of Article 14 and Article 21 of the Constitution which guarantees equality before the law to everyone irrespective of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth and right to life and liberty, respectively.

Those opposing the move argue that the criminalising marital rape amounts to undue interference in personal matters and would cause a death blow to an institution of marriage. Another argument made by those favouring retaining the exception is that striking it down will result in the creation of a new offence which is a clear case of judicial overreach.

The judgement delivered by the Delhi High Court is reflective of both these sentiments. In spite of the fact that the split judgement has ultimately left it to the Supreme Court to decide upon the constitutionality of the exception clause, it has put forward substantive arguments, both in favour of and against striking down the exemption clause.

Justice C Hari Shankar while upholding the constitutional validity of the exception clause.

The institution of marriage, and the intelligible differential.

The demographics of a marriage are sui generis. The marriage may be between equals or unequals; it may be good or bad; it may be happy or sad; in every case, however, the factum of marriage, and the relationship between the parties that emerges consequent to the solemnisation of marriage, have their own distinct and identifiable indicia, not to be found in any other relationship between any two individuals. Myriad are the examples of male-female relationship; they may be mother and son, sister and brother or, less platonically, girlfriend and boyfriend, or fiance and fianc. The relationship between husband and wife, which emerges as a result of the tying of the proverbial matrimonial knot is, however, distinct from each and all of these relationships. To ignore, or even to seek to undermine, this, is to ignore plain reality. Equally plain, and real, is the fact that the primary distinction, which distinguishes the relationship of wife and husband, from all other relationships of woman and man, is the carrying, with the relationship, as one of its inexorable incidents, of a legitimate expectation of sex.

This aspect of the matter has been correctly emphasised by Mr Sai Deepak, and I find myself entirely in agreement with him. The petitioners, in my view, have completely failed to note the uniqueness of marriage as an institution, its peculiar demographics and incidents, and the emotional, psychological, social and other complex equations that exist between a wife and a husband. As Ms Nundy (Ms Karuna Nundy, counsel for the petitioner challenging the exception clause) herself acknowledges, there are several legislations which recognise the inherent differences that arise in the context of a marital relationship. The submissions of the petitioners effectively consign all unique incidents of a marital relationship to obscurity. This is particularly evident from a somewhat surprising submission that Mr Rao, learned amicus, sought to advance. Mr Rao sought to visualise four situations; the first in which the man and woman are strangers, the second in which the man and woman are not yet married, but are five minutes away from marriage, the third in which the man and woman have been married five minutes earlier and the fourth in which the man and woman, though married, are separated. Mr Rao sought to contend that the incongruity in the impugned exception was manifest from the fact that while, in the first, the second and the fourth instance, non-consensual sex by the man with the woman would amount to rape, it would not, in the third instance. What was rape ten minutes earlier, therefore, submits Mr Rao, is not treated as rape ten minutes later, though the act is the same and there is want of consent on both occasions.

Striking down the exception clause would mean creating the offence.

To my mind, the proscription on Courts creating an offence by judicial fiat operates as a restraint even on the exercise of the power to strike down a legislative provision as unconstitutional. In other words, if a provision is found to be unconstitutional, the Court may strike it down provided, by doing so, it is not creating an offence. If, by its judgement, the Court creates an offence, there is an absolute proscription, even if the provision is otherwise unconstitutional. If this were not the legal position, there was no occasion, at all, for the Supreme Court, having held that a case for reading down the impugned Exception existed, to examine whether, by doing so, it was creating an offence.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher while striking down the exception clause

The exception clause makes women subservient to men

State appears to have stopped short of conferring the right on a woman to call out an offender who happens to be her husband when he subjects her to rape. The argument that the State has recognised other forms of sexual offences and, therefore, to protect the familial structure, it does not wish to go further (i.e., empower a married woman to trigger the criminal law when her husband subjects her to rape) amounts to giving recognition to the abominable Common Law Doctrine that a married woman is nothing but chattel who loses her sexual agency once she enters matrimony.

Rape should be called rape, irrespective of the nature of the relationship between perpetrator and victim

Certain sexual offences need to be called out for what they are. Sexual assault by the husband on his wife which falls within the fold of Section 375 of the IPC, in my opinion, needs to be called out as rape as that is one of the ways in which the society expresses its disapproval concerning the conduct of the offender. Oddly, the prevailing mores in society appear to stigmatise the victim rather than the rapist. Therefore, I agree with Ms Nundy that the sexual assault which falls within the four corners of Section 375 of the IPC needs to be labelled as rape irrespective of whether it occurs within or outside the bounds of marriage.

The presence of other sections criminalising violence and sexual abuse against women does not mean marital rape should not be made an offence

The fact that certain ingredients of the offence covered under Section 375 are found present in other provisions of the IPC concerning hurt (Section 319 read with Section 321& 323), grievous hurt (Section 320 read with Section 322& 325) or cruelty (Section 498A) does not provide a satisfactory answer as to why a sexual assault which is synonymous with rape should not be labelled as rape when the offence is committed on an adult married woman by her husband.

Advocate J Sai Deepak who appeared for Men Welfare Trust (MWT) which challenged the petition seeking to strike down the exception clause made an important submission.

He submitted, MWT is not opposed to the criminalisation of spousal sexual offences, especially, non-consensual sex between spouses or those in spouse-like relationships. MWT does not contend that husbands/men have a right to impose themselves on their wives/spouses sighting marriage, as be all and end all of, implied consent to every marital privilege including sexual intercourse. That being said, trust, dignity, and respect which form the basis of a marriage is a two-way street. A multi-layered and multivariable nature of a marital relationship has been reduced by the petitioners to one singular issue i.e., consent; a proposition with which MWT disagrees. MWT propounds a more calibrated position.

He added that the issue at hand is not merely about consent, but also about context, which counsel for petitioners seeking to strike down the marital rape exemption clause, refuse to acknowledge and it would be erroneous, to reduce the ambit of the discussion merely to the aspect of consent.

Famous American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged writes, There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. As a society, its high time we clear the ambiguity over the issue of marital rape. Either we decide to acknowledge it and make it a criminal offence or we decide to exempt it from judicial scrutiny is a choice that the legislature and judiciary have to make.

But any further procrastination would only allow the middle-evil to tarnish the sanctimonious institution of marriage.

Shishir Tripathi is a journalist and researcher based in Delhi. He has worked with The Indian Express, Firstpost, Governance Now, and Indic Collective. He writes on Law, Governance and Politics. Views expressed are personal.

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Marital rape: How understanding context rather than just focusing on consent will help resolve the issue - Firstpost

Is there going to be a second season of Deadly Class, and if so, when? Hot on the heels of Deadly Classs first season finale.

Fans are wondering if there will be a second season of Deadly Class, given the shows popularity and the fact that there are still a lot of stories to tell about Kings Dominion and the strange gang of would-be killers, group managers, and cartel lords that comprise it.

Originally produced by Syfy, the Deadly Class TV series was based on the Rick Remender and Wesley Craig comedy sequence of the same name.

Deadly Class is the most daring new series, thanks to its 2015 makeover.

There were some positive reviews for Deadly Class, but the show didnt quite live up to what Syfy had hoped for.

The series maintained its top spot throughout the first season and also observed a large rise in ratings in the days following each episode due to the most important positive aspects in live+7 rankings closer to the seasons conclusion. But what does this mean for the upcoming second season?

Read More:Behind Her Eyes Season 2 Release Date: Cancellation & Renewal Status in 2022 on Netflix!

Benedict Wong(Twitter) portrays Master Lin, the brutal headmaster of Kings Dominion. Benjamin Wadsworth is another alias for Marcus Lopez Arguello.

New recruit for King Dominion and the promise of Sayas loyalty In addition to being the boss of the Kuroki Syndicate, Lana Condor portrays Saya Kuroki, who is also Marcuss benefactor.

Maria Gabriela de Faria(Instagram) portrays Maria Salazar in her role of her. Soto Vatos member and Chicos previous sweetheart, he is well-known in the community.

Actor Luke Tennie(Instagram) portrays Willie Lewis, who heads the Final World Order (F. W. O). His best friend in Kings Dominion, Marcus Liam James portrays a jovial punk rocker named Billy Bennett. And a close buddy of Marcuss.

His father was a corrupt drug smuggler, and he grew up in a corrupt family. In addition to being Marias ex-boyfriend, Chico is the leader of the Soto Vatos and is played by Duval.

Read More:Aggretsuko Season 5: Release Date & Confirmation on Netflix in the Year 2023!

The film, Deadly Class tells the story of the Kings Dominion, a non-public school renowned for producing sinners, where parents send their children to give birth to a new generation of criminals.

Master Lin helps him adapt to the academys methods when he is taken under his wing. Along with teaching dangerous techniques, hes trying to dispel the scholars unwelcoming air of secrecy.

Students at the school must undergo extensive training in order to learn about poisons, lead shootings, instruct in the physical struggle, control victims psychologically, and achieve their goals.

In Marcus mind, Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States, is responsible for the death of his parents.

Every day at school, Marcus becomes an observer of all the wrong things that go on and is often seen debating the thoughts that fill his mind.

There are so many things going on at the school that it is impossible for him not to feel conflicted feelings about what is happening.

Read More:Selling Sunset Season 6: Possible Release Date & Confirmation by Netflix in 2022 or 2023!

Additionally, Deadly Class contains a number of spectacular deaths and turns that take you down a dark path, a brutal curriculum, some cutthroat social networks, and increasing risks.

In order to grow as people, the kids in the series must confront their pasts and challenges. It forces us to reevaluate our ideas and beliefs.

This series is enthralling because of the strong casts, startling dark bends, and intricately developed roles.

During a conversation about the shows narrative. I dont suggest that to appear cynical or to highlight, Remender said. As a result, I believe we can confidently state that the realm is home to a large number of horrifying individuals.

And what fascinates me is how a seemingly innocent infant may transform into the most horrifying of human beings in any of their many manifestations. Thats what Im assuming Kings Dominion is. Forcing characters into a grinder and watching what they emerge as is the most fascinating part for me.

The series is described as absolutely showy, actual intelligent, honestly courageous within a very familiar trend of what makes audacity, in the review. When it comes to television, Syfys Deadly Class photo book arrangement best represents the peak of the angry young man.

If youre looking for something to read between the time you were obsessed with Holden Caulfield and the time you saw Ayn Rand, this is the perfect book for you.

According to Deadly Classs synopsis, it is a series to be enjoyed before being suddenly dropped

If there is a new season, Master Lins complicated schemes and possibly the catacombs beneath the school can be followed, not to mention the multiple deceptions and other arcs that the comics have already covered.

Read More:Top Boy Season 5 Release Date: Is This Series Release Date Confirmed for This Year on Netflix!

Despite Rick Remenders best efforts, Deadly Class season two has yet to find a new domestic. There were no other streaming platforms available to renew the show, therefore he announced in June 2019 that it had been canceled.

As a result, Starzplay was able to secure the UK license for broadcasting Season 1. Season 2 will not be aired on the platform because of this.

Consequently, Deadly Class and its destruction have created a frenzy among its fans, who are glued to the screen. Thousands of people contacted Netflix and asked them to bring back the show. You can see how popular it is among fans.

As a result of the feedback from viewers, we expect that any streaming platform will bring back the content in 2023. This section will be updated as soon as we receive more significant information.

Deadly Class Season 2: Everything You Need to Know. I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading what I had to say. If you have any questions, please dont hesitate to contact us! There is yet to be a Deadly Class Season 2 trailer unveiled.

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Deadly Class Season 2: Is a Release Date or Rumor in the Offing on Netflix? - Federal Regulations Advisor